About Best SMP Servers
bestsmpservers.com is a single ranking page kept genuinely current: ten Minecraft SMP servers, a live player count beside each one, and a written record of every position change.
What this site is
One ranking page, a methodology page that shows its own arithmetic, a record of every weekly position change, and 5 written guides. There is no account system, no voting, no submission form and no page per server, because none of those things make the ranking more accurate.
Where the numbers come from
We ping every listed address ourselves every three minutes and store the result. Nothing on this site is copied from another server list, and no player count here has been typed in by hand. Where a server reports a count for a whole network of gamemodes rather than for its SMP world, the entry says so, and the ranking discounts the figure before scoring it.
Everything we measure is published as an open JSON feed under CC BY 4.0, so you can check our page against our own data.
How the order is decided
By us, after playing the servers. There is no weighted formula behind it, and we do not publish one, because a list of ten servers ordered by an arithmetic score implies a precision nobody ranking Minecraft servers actually has. The methodology page sets out what we weigh. What we do commit to is that no position is for sale and that every number on the page is measured rather than estimated.
What we will not do
- Sell a ranking position, or accept payment for one.
- Dress an editorial judgement up as arithmetic.
- Publish a star rating or review score for a server we rank. A rating you issue yourself about somebody else, on a page you control, tells a reader nothing.
- Print a player count we have not measured, or round one up.
- Describe a feature we have not seen in the server's own materials or in our own testing.
- Claim a number is live when the ping behind it has gone stale. The staleness rules are written down and enforced in code.
Who runs it
The order comes from joining and playing every server on this list rather than from anybody's marketing. Placement has never been sold and no server has ever paid to be here.
Corrections
If something on this page about your server is wrong, out of date, or reads as an unfair characterisation, we would rather fix it than argue about it. The fastest route is the contact address on the methodology page, and corrections to factual errors get made the same day.