Velocity vs BungeeCord: Sizing a Minecraft Proxy Network on Dedicated Hardware

A Minecraft proxy network lets hundreds of players log into one address and get routed to the right backend server — minigames, survival worlds, creative plots — without ever seeing the plumbing behind it. The two tools that do this are BungeeCord and its modern successor Velocity. This guide covers what each one runs on, how much RAM and CPU a proxy actually needs per player, and how to size the dedicated hardware around it.

What Runs on the Proxy vs the Backends

The division of labor matters more than any benchmark. The proxy handles connection management, player handshakes, routing, and lightweight plugins like lobby switching and permission checks. It does not simulate the world — no entities, no chunks, no tick loop. The backends are ordinary Minecraft servers, each running its own world, plugins, and tick loop, connected back to the proxy.

This is why proxy sizing is mostly a RAM and network story, while backend sizing is a CPU single-thread story. Buy hardware for both, but do not make the mistake of throwing cores at the proxy and starving the backends.

RAM and CPU Per Proxy: Realistic Numbers

Concurrent players	Proxy RAM	Proxy CPU	Notes
50	1–2 GB	2 cores	Enough for a small community network
200	3–4 GB	4 cores	Adds headroom for chat, permissions, and lobby plugins
500	6–8 GB	4–6 cores	Velocity stays lean; BungeeCord leans higher with plugins
1,000+	8–16 GB across 2 proxies	6+ cores total	Split player load across two proxies behind a load balancer

Rule of thumb: budget roughly 1 GB of proxy RAM per 50–100 players plus plugin headroom. Velocity’s async, event-driven design typically uses less memory than BungeeCord at the same player count and handles connection floods better, which is why most new networks in 2026 start on Velocity. Either way, single-thread performance still matters for the proxy — a Ryzen 7000 or Xeon E-2300 class CPU is the right neighborhood, not a 10-year-old Xeon.

Sizing the Backend Servers

Each backend is a normal Minecraft server with its own RAM budget: roughly 1 GB base plus 100–200 MB per player slot for vanilla at view distance 8–10, and more for modded packs. A 200-player network usually means three to six backends of 25–80 players each rather than one giant server — smaller backends hold up better under chunk-generation load and let you restart one world without kicking everyone.

Add the numbers together before you order: four backends at 8 GB each plus a 4 GB proxy is 36 GB of RAM before the OS, monitoring, and backup jobs. That is why a 32 GB dedicated server feels tight for a real network and 64 GB is the comfortable 2026 starting point for 150–300 total players.

One Machine or a Separate Proxy Node?

• Same box (up to ~200–300 total players): perfectly workable if the CPU has single-thread headroom left over after the backends. Use CPU pinning to keep the proxy and each backend off each other’s cores.
• Separate proxy node (500+ players or heavy plugin load): a small dedicated box — 4 cores, 4–8 GB RAM, NVMe — running only the proxy and its plugins. It isolates connection floods from the backends and makes proxy restarts invisible to world uptime.
• Latency cost: a proxy hop adds roughly 1–3 ms when it is in the same data center as the backends. Players will not feel it; a proxy on another continent will be felt immediately.

Network and Failure Planning

• One public entry point: the proxy owns the public IP and port 25565; backends listen on private IPs and should never be exposed publicly.
• Bandwidth is additive: total usage is the sum of all backends, plus map downloads and backups. A 1 Gbps unmetered port is the safe baseline; 10 Gbps is for networks pushing constant downloads.
• Restart strategy: a proxy restart disconnects every player. Use a fallback server so players land somewhere instead of a disconnect screen, schedule restarts at low-traffic hours, and back up the proxy config (velocity.toml or config.yml) and its plugin data — they are small but annoying to rebuild.
• DDoS: the proxy is your public surface. Filtered hosting or always-on mitigation at the edge is what keeps the whole network alive when someone targets the IP.

The Bottom Line

Size the proxy by players and plugins (about 1 GB per 50–100 players), size the backends by world and modpack (1 GB base plus 100–200 MB per slot), then add 25–30% headroom for monitoring and backups. A 64 GB dedicated server with a current-generation 8-core CPU and NVMe storage covers a 150–300 player network on one machine; beyond 500 players, split the proxy onto its own node. Start with Velocity, keep backends small, and plan restarts — the hardware is the easy part. When you are pricing the box, you can compare dedicated server plans on our comparison table and filter by RAM, CPU generation, and port speed.