How voting works and why servers ask for it

Votes order the default server list. A vote costs nothing, takes one click, and is the main mechanism by which a small server ends up on the same page as a large one.

The rules here

One vote per server, per person, per day. The day rolls over at midnight UTC, not at midnight where you are.
You do not need an account, though signing in makes your votes count reliably across devices and networks.
Votes are counted against a salted one-way hash of your IP address, so we can tell a repeat vote from a new one without storing where you connect from.
Monthly totals reset on the first of each month. The all-time total keeps counting and is shown on every listing.

What a vote actually moves

The default sort is votes cast in the current calendar month, highest first, with players online right now as the tie-breaker. That is deliberately short-memory. A server has to keep earning its position rather than coasting on a good month two years ago, which is what makes the top of the list reachable for something that launched last week.

Nothing else in the ranking can be bought. The one paid placement anywhere on the site is the featured slot on the homepage, and it is always labelled as featured.

Why servers ask you to vote

Server owners have very few cheap ways to be found. Advertising costs money, search results for "minecraft server" are held by sites fifteen years old, and word of mouth is slow. A server list is one of the few places where thirty motivated players can visibly move a server's position in an afternoon. That is why the request is so constant, and why nearly every server has a /vote command.

It is also why vote rewards exist at all. Owners are trading in-game value for visibility, and the exchange rate is set by how badly they need players.

How rewards reach you

Most servers give something in-game for voting: currency, a crate key, a small cosmetic, sometimes a vote party that fires when the whole server hits a target. Mechanically this runs on a plugin called Votifier, or its successor NuVotifier. When your vote registers here we send a signed message to the server's Votifier port, and the server's own plugin decides what you get.

That is entirely the server's system. We do not run it, cannot see what it awarded and cannot restore a reward that never arrived. When one is missing the usual causes are that you entered a different username from the one you play under, that the server's Votifier was offline when the vote fired, or that the reward is queued until you next log in. Ask on the server's own Discord — most have a channel for exactly this.

Should you vote?

If you like a server, yes. It is the cheapest support you can give it and it costs a minute a day. Just do not read the ranking backwards: votes measure how well a server mobilises the players it already has, which correlates with an active community but says nothing about whether the server suits you. How to choose a server covers what does.

What gets a listing removed

Automated voting, rotating through proxies or VPN exits, paying for votes, and rewards that only pay out if a player votes from more than one address all count as manipulation. We remove the affected votes when we find them, and a server that keeps doing it loses its listing. Rewarding players for voting normally is fine and is the entire point of the system. The full wording is in the terms.

Running a server and want the votes to count? Adding your server takes a couple of minutes and the vote link is generated for you.