My point is 16GB of memory isn't a whole lot if you've already got server hardware and a place to host it, that's really low-end these days, but it's a small fortune if you need to pony up $5-10/GB. per month for hosting services.

I've been able to host Minecraft instances on my own hardware over a cable modem feed, and on a VM provisioned within a machine I fully control, but it's just not economical to do cloud-wise.

I do miss the days when the server component of a multi-player game was pretty lean and non-intrusive so you could run it as a background process on pretty much anything that had good bandwidth.