First steps after ordering
Where to find your new server, how to start it and what the panel shows you on day one.
Your server is created the moment your payment goes through. No queue, no manual setup on our side — by the time the confirmation page loads, the machine already exists.
Finding your server
Sign in at manager.game-host.com and open Your services in the left menu. Every server you own is listed there; click one to open its management view.
The header of that view is worth reading once, because almost everything you need day to day is in it:
- IP address — what you give to players. Click it to copy.
- Custom address — a friendlier
*.gmhst.comname you can set yourself. - Status — Online, Offline or Starting, with uptime next to it.
- Expires — when the current billing period ends.
- Start / Stop / Restart — power controls.
Starting it for the first time
Press Start. The console below will fill with output as the game server boots.
How long that takes depends entirely on the game. A small Minecraft world is playable in under a minute; Rust generating a fresh 4000-size map, or a large modpack loading several hundred mods, can take considerably longer. Watch the console rather than the clock — the server is ready when it says so, not after a fixed time.
What the tabs do
The left column inside a server groups everything by purpose. Every game gets these:
| Tab | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Dashboard | Console, live CPU and memory usage, power controls |
| Files | Browse and edit server files straight in the browser |
| SFTP connection | Credentials for FileZilla, WinSCP or any SFTP client |
| Databases | MySQL databases, if your game or plugins need one |
| Server backups | Manual copies you can restore with one click |
| IP addresses and ports | Extra ports, useful for query, RCON or voice mods |
| Game Swap | Turn this server into a different game, keeping a preset of the old one |
| Schedules | Automatic restarts and commands on a timetable |
| Subusers | Give a friend access without handing over your account |
| Activity log | Who did what, and when |
| Startup parameters | Per-game variables: world seed, passwords, modding framework |
Minecraft servers get an extra group on top of that — server creator, version and engine, plugin, mod and modpack installers, player list, Java version and log analysis.
Before you invite people
Three things worth doing while the server is still empty:
Set a name players will recognise. The custom address is easier to share than an IP and stays the same if the underlying address ever changes.
Take a manual backup once the world is generated. It costs you nothing and gives you a point to fall back to. How many copies you can keep depends on your plan — the 2 GB plan has no backup slots, larger plans have progressively more. Automatic daily backups are a paid add-on.
Add a scheduled restart. A server that restarts nightly stays healthier than one running for weeks, especially with mods. Schedules is the tab for that.
If something goes wrong
The console is the first place to look — it prints the actual reason a server refuses to start. The panel watches it too and will open a window when it recognises a common failure: a missing EULA, running out of memory, or a Java version that does not match the game.
If the console scrolled past the problem, Activity log keeps a record of actions taken on the service, and Minecraft servers additionally have Log analysis, which reads a log file you point it at and explains what it finds.
Still stuck? Open a ticket from Help centre in the main menu. Include the server ID from the header — it is the fastest way for us to look at the right machine.