How to secure a Minecraft server and stop bots from joining

This is one of the most important steps to take when setting up your Minecraft server and one that's missed by a lot of people.

By default, a Minecraft server is not secure. What do we mean by this? Well, anyone can join your server at any time. This means that people could join while you're not online, and grief your server.

How Likely Is This To Happen?

Sadly, very. There are groups of people in the Minecraft community who look for un-secure servers, for the sole reason to log in and grief the servers.

What Can I Do To Prevent This?

The first step is to apply a whitelist. The only reason not to have a whitelist on your server is if you're running a public server. If this is the case, you'll have claim protection on the server, so you don't need to worry about this.

To set a whitelist on your server, we can head to the Player Manager. Then select the whitelist button.

Here you can add users to the whitelist by entering their names. In this example, we've added the users SleepingTea98, MrSoulPenguin, and AlmostCornetto to the list. The next step is the turn on the whitelist. To do this, we're going to press the blue Turn On Whitelist button.

That's it. You're all set. Only the people on your list can join the server.

Making a Backup

The next thing we're going to do is set a running backup. That way if anything does happen, you can restore your server.

Head to the schedules section on the panel. We're going to select manual selection in the minute box, and then set it to 1. We're then going to set the hour box to every 12 hours. This will set your server to run the schedule every 12 hours.

Next press create a schedule.

Running The Backup

This will have now made a schedule for you, but we need to tell it to do something. Press on the schedule you've just made. Then press new task.

In the action drop-down, select a backup, then press create a task.

That's it, you now have a backup running every 12 hours.

Restoring The Backup

To restore the backup, head to the backup manager. Here you'll find a list of all your backups. To restore a backup, press on the three-dotted lines, then press restore.

This will restore all your files.

You're All Set

That's it you're all set. If your server is attacked. We keep offsite backups for you. You can request our team to restore this for you, via a support ticket. However, this should only be used as a last option.