BisectHosting Offers Open-Source Tools that Run Minecraft Servers and Empower Modpack Creators

TL; DR: Many providers compete in the Minecraft server market, but BisectHosting differentiates itself with a commitment to rapid customer service and audited software solutions. The company launched during the early days of Minecraft and remains a major player in the space. Now, it plans to expand into other games as part of its strategic road map. BisectHosting also owns its hardware, making it an ideal choice for modpack creators who require extra support and more fine-tuned server resources.

Minecraft launched in 2009, and by 2016, the game had sold more than 100 million copies. It wasn’t long before hobbyists also began launching their own Minecraft servers, ushering in an era when many hosting providers competed for a slice of the fast-growing market.

Some of the original entrants focused explicitly on game servers, while general-interest VPS vendors expanded their product offerings. In the early days of Minecraft hosting, growth was often more of an accident than a strategy.

That was the case with BisectHosting, a company that grew out of a shared passion for gaming.

BisectHosting began as a temporary Minecraft server shared by a few friends. Its population quickly grew to include many more players, including BisectHosting Co-Founder and CTO Andrew Blatchford.

“As our player base grew, we started with a shared host,” said Max Podkidkin, Co-Founder and CEO of BisectHosting. “Then we had a VPS, then a dedicated server.”

Andrew’s experience with Linux left him managing the technical side. Eventually, they purchased their own co-located hardware. Then they had an epiphany: “We went through all these companies and had all these servers, but we never had a good customer experience — and no assistance at all,” Max said.

The partners set out to change that dynamic. The company, originally known as TheMinecraftHost, soon changed its name to ProMinecraftHost. Two years later, the company rebranded as BisectHosting to open up more hosting avenues. The duo built their own server, launched a website, and started hosting other Minecraft servers.

BisectHosting offers non-Minecraft virtual private servers, but the company’s bread-and-butter still relates to hosting the game. It offers 40 different Minecraft-related server packages and several dedicated servers and VPS solutions. In addition to Minecraft, customers can select from games including Terraria, ARK, Left 4 Dead 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and Rust.

“We use a panel called Multicraft, but we put thousands of hours into it,” Max said. “If you look at a default Multicraft panel, and then you look at ours, you will have no idea it’s Multicraft. Ours offers a lot of flagship features that aren’t even in Multicraft. We use it as a backbone.”

The decision to customize Multicraft instead of creating a new control panel from scratch delivers several benefits, including more robust security.

“Multicraft has been around for more than 10 years,” Max said. “It’s proven, and they’ve done independent security audits. So the panel is secure, which is important.”

Several Minecraft server vendors boast of proprietary control panels, but Max said he disagrees that bespoke panels are better.

“A lot of hosts with custom panels are saving money because they’re not paying licensing fees as we do,” he said. “But at the same time, you don’t know what kind of security audits they did on that panel. I would argue that Multicraft is more secure because it’s 10 years old, and there hasn’t been any news of huge security flaws.”

Reliance on a vetted, open-source solution makes BisectHosting infrastructure inherently less risky, and savvy customers appreciate that commitment to openness and software auditing.

Hosting providers often differentiate on some mix of cost, quality, security, and support. BisectHosting aims to keep all of those variables high, but the company prides itself on its support team.

“Our biggest thing has been customer support,” Max said. “We probably have the best and quickest support of all of our competitors. A lot of our competitors have staff that are volunteers — they pay per ticket, or they have random people. We don’t do that. We offer an extremely quick turnaround rate. Our average reply time is 20 minutes.”

That speed is essential because a broken server can affect hundreds or thousands of players and quickly put the credibility of the server’s sponsors at risk. Although many problems can be traced to server administrators tweaking beyond their knowledge level, BisectHosting prioritizes solutions that get a server fully operational instead of putting the onus on customers to figure it out. In addition to typical tickets, the company uses a Discord server — a gamer’s chat server of choice — for feedback and conversation.

Trustpilot helps the company measure customer satisfaction. Unlike many hosting sector vendors that only invite satisfied customers to leave a review, BisectHosting automatically generates a response link for everyone who uses the support team.

“We don’t pick and choose who gets invited,” Max said. “And we’re still getting good word-of-mouth reviews.”

Minecraft supports many different modifications that apply on a per-server basis. That means servers can use different combinations.

“We positioned ourselves as experts in modded servers,” Max said. “We partner with a lot of modpack creators for Minecraft, so a lot of people come to us with modded servers, which is much more resource-intensive to host, and there are just a lot more issues that come with it, too. But our support handles it extremely well.”

BisectHosting owns its infrastructure, and it doesn’t rent any servers from another provider. That ownership is critical to BisectHosting’s support strategy. When a host acts as a reseller of another provider’s services, the host’s support team may have to work with their provider’s support team to solve problems — adding complexity and time to solving an end user’s technical problem.

“People just want to play the game,” Andrew said. “Our control panel’s ease of use makes it simple to get started. You don’t want people spending hours trying to get something working.”

BisectHosting’s strong commitment to service and hardware ownership has resulted in rapid ticket response and streamlined support for modpacks. Customers with problems, even ones of their own making, find swift resolutions thanks to the company’s dedicated, in-house support staff and access to its consumer-facing Discord server.

The company’s reliance on the open-source Multicraft platform means customers benefit from a control panel with a long history and several favorable external audits. Customers don’t need to worry that a significant coding error will compromise a server or its data in a one-off control panel or that they’ll be locked out of an essential configuration that only a support engineer can fix.

BisectHosting offers a wide variety of hosting options because it runs its own hardware. The tiers range from low-intensity budget solutions to complex, high-powered Minecraft servers that can accommodate hundreds or thousands of players without missing a beat. A mix of control panels with varying feature sets also keeps costs low for people who don’t need all the bells and whistles.

The road map for BisectHosting includes adding new games, using a customized version of Pterodactyl Panel. The open-source tool manages containerized game instances with a modern user interface. The games Terraria and 7 Days to Die already use it, and Max said he is enthusiastic about its prospects.

“It’s been in development a long time. It’s been tried and proven. So we’ll create a fork of that panel and customize it. When we have a panel that has the features required for a certain game, we’ll add it to our list.”

The new games won’t adversely affect its Minecraft hosting services, though.

“We’re constantly adding more features and ease-of-use tools for our Minecraft products, too,” Andrew said.