I’ve been following a fascinating discussion about Minecraft server performance lately, and it’s got me thinking about something that frustrates me to no end: the way we’ve been conditioned to believe that cloud services are always the answer, even when they’re not.

Someone ran some tests comparing Minecraft chunk generation speeds across different setups - from expensive Hetzner cloud instances to a decade-old CPU that’s barely worth anything. The results? That old hardware was holding its own remarkably well against modern cloud offerings that cost significantly more per month.