TrueTick vs TickHosting: two different hosts with similar names

First, the thing that probably brought you here: TickHosting and TrueTick are two different companies. If you were looking for TickHosting, the free Minecraft host, it lives at tickhosting.com, and nothing on this site will log you into it. The names are close; the companies aren't related. If you're still reading, this page is about what actually differs between the two. It's written by one of them, so every claim about TickHosting below links to their own site — check it before taking our word for anything.

Who each one is actually for

TickHosting is for a free server with a lot of RAM, or a cheap always-on one. Free plans at 4, 6 and 8 GB with no card, and paid plans from €2 a month. On sheer free gigabytes and on the monthly price of a 24/7 server, they beat us, and this page says so below.

TrueTick is for a server whose CPU share is reserved for it, with a tick number on screen to prove it — billed by the hours it's awake rather than by the month.

Free vs free

Both of us have a free tier. They're free in different ways, and the word "free" shouldn't do more work than it can.

TickHosting free: a lot of RAM, with upkeep attached. Three free plans — 4, 6 and 8 GB of RAM, 10 GB of storage, no credit card, modpacks allowed. The trade, per their own free-vs-paid table: a free server doesn't stay online when nobody is playing, it needs manual renewal, and the panel shows ads. How often you renew depends on which of their pages you read — the landing page lists renewal every 8, 6 or 4 hours depending on the plan, while the pricing page says "every few days" — so check their panel for the rule that applies today.

TrueTick free: much less of it, and no renewal clicks. 20 hours a month, 2 GB of RAM, Paper, Purpur or Vanilla, in the regions shown live on the free page, one server per account, no card. There's no renewal button to press and there are no ads: the server sleeps when it's empty and wakes when a player connects. The one rule to know: a free server nobody wakes for 30 days is backed up and removed to free its slot for the waitlist — we email a warning at 27 days, and removal waits at least 3 days after that email. While it's awake, its CPU share is reserved by the same admission control that guards paid servers. The catch is the size of the pool: it is small, the count is shown live on the same page, and when it's full there's a waitlist. On the day we wrote this, it was full.

If you need more than 2 GB for free, or mods for free, that's TickHosting, not us.

The comparison

Checked September 2026 — every TickHosting cell links to their own site:

	TickHosting	TrueTick
Free tier	4, 6 or 8 GB RAM, 10 GB storage, no card	20 hours a month, 2 GB RAM, a small pool in the regions shown live on /free, no card
Free-tier upkeep	hibernates when empty, manual renewal, ads in the panel	sleeps when empty and wakes when a player joins; no renewal clicks, but a free server nobody wakes for 30 days is backed up and removed (we email a warning at 27 days, and removal waits at least 3 days after it); no ads
Paid price	Eco from €2/mo, Performance from €3/mo, billed monthly	$0.012 per active GB-hour metered, or $3/GB-month flat
Cost while nobody plays	paid plans are "always online — no hibernation", so the month costs the same either way	$0 while asleep on the metered plan
Hardware they name	Intel Xeon, DDR4 and SSD on Free and Eco; AMD Ryzen 9, DDR5 and NVMe on Performance	a CPU share reserved per running server — admission control refuses to start a server the node can't fully back
Locations	free: Frankfurt and New York; paid: Finland, Singapore and Canada on Eco, Germany on Performance	EU and NA
Panel	Pterodactyl — console, file manager, SFTP, databases, schedules, subusers, backups	web console, file manager and backups, plus live TPS/MSPT on Paper, Purpur, Forge and NeoForge; on Vanilla and Fabric from Minecraft 1.20.3
Other games	Hytale and SCP:SL	Minecraft only

Where TickHosting is the right call

• You want a free server with real RAM. 8 GB free against our 2 GB isn't close. Their free plans also aren't sold by the hour; ours stops at 20 hours a month.
• You want mods without paying. Their free plans take modpacks. Our free tier is Paper, Purpur or Vanilla at a fixed 2 GB; a modded server with us is a paid 4 GB one.
• Your server is up 24/7 and the monthly price decides it. A 4 GB Eco plan was €4 a month when we checked. Our flat plan is $3/GB-month, so $12 for the same 4 GB. Euros and dollars aren't the same money, but no exchange rate closes a gap that size.
• Your players are in Asia. They have a Singapore location. We run EU and NA only.
• You also want Hytale or SCP:SL. They host both. We host Minecraft and nothing else.

Where the two differ in our favour

• No renewal clicks. A free server here has no renewal button. It goes to sleep after the last player leaves and starts again when someone connects to its address — nobody has to open a panel first. It isn't kept forever, though: a free server nobody wakes for 30 days is backed up and removed. We email a warning at 27 days, and removal waits at least 3 days after that email.
• A reserved CPU share, enforced in code. We refuse to start a server — free or paid — if the node can't back its full CPU share. That's why the free pool is small, and why we'd rather show a waitlist than squeeze one more server in. What that protects against is measured in our oversell benchmark.
• You pay for awake hours. A 4 GB server on the metered plan costs $0.048 for each hour it's awake — 40 awake hours in a month is $1.92, and $4 buys about 83 hours. For a server that's busy a few evenings a week, that comes in under a monthly plan. For one that's up around the clock it doesn't, and the section above already says who wins that.

Live TPS and MSPT also sit on our server page — on Paper, Purpur, Forge and NeoForge, and on Vanilla and Fabric from Minecraft 1.20.3 — so "is it lagging?" is a reading rather than an argument. We haven't found a TickHosting page that says whether their panel shows a tick number, so it isn't on the list above.

Verdict

If you want the most free RAM you can get, free mods, or the cheapest always-on server, take TickHosting — on those three they beat us, and their site is tickhosting.com, not this one.

If you'd rather have fewer free hours with no renewal clicks, a CPU share that's reserved while your server is awake, and a bill that follows the hours it's awake — see if a free server is open, or check the maths for your server.