Draft:Aternos

Aternos, is a 100% free Minecraft server hosting service founded in 2013. Aternos is completely funded through ads. It has over 57 million users and over 1 million daily Minecraft players.

History
(History was traced from Aternos's Twitter page)

On May 1, 2013, Aternos was founded by Matthais Neid in Bonn, Germany.

On September 16, 2013, Aternos.org is first crawled by the Wayback Machine.

On April 13, 2015, Aternos said on their Twitter website that Aternos had been translated to Spanish and Japanese.

On June 1, 2015, Aternos started a competition for drawing the company logo, with the prize being iPads to celebrate their 1 million accounts milestone.

On August 5, 2015, Aternos announced that their team were going to join their first gamescom.

On May 16, 2016, Aternos redesigned its homepage.

On September 10, 2016, Aternos released server hosting for Minecraft:Pocket Edition]. On December 16, 2016, Aternos announced that their [[community had translate 31 languages.

On March 26, 2017, Aternos announced that they had opened a Discord Server.

On July 23, 2017, Aternos announced that they had reached the milestone of 60,000 players playing on a single day.

On August 4, 2017, Aternos redesigned its server panel, with a Headstart Key to celebrate it.

On February 21, 2018, Aternos redisigned its website page completely, claming that it was "faster, prettier and more secure."

On May 1, 2018, Aternos released its new automatic backup feature, coincidentally on its birthday.

On September 6, 2018, Aternos annouced that they had over 7 million accounts, more than the population of Paraguay at that time.

On September 11, 2018, Aternos released server hosting for Minecraft.

On February 3, 2019, Aternos announced that it had reached 10,000 players playing simultaneously.

On February 22, 2019, Aternos announced that it added the ability to set different time zones for servers, with over 400 to choose from.

On November 20, 2019, Aternos announced that they had reached a new milestone of 14 million players.

In 2019, Aternos expanded its server hosting to Scaleway's virtual cloud instances launching service, allowing its waiting time to drop significantly from approximately 30 minutes before to just a few minutes.

On March 15, 2020, Aternos announced that they had reached 100,000 players online simultaneously.

On June 30, 2020, Aternos released Exaroton, a high end server hosting platform which users needed to pay money for, with bigger player slots and better performance. According to Matthias Neid, the company's CEO, Exatoron was released to allow users who wanted higher-end servers to pay and use their services, as Aternos only allows 20 player slots and up to 2gigabytes of RAM.

On May 12, 2021, Aternos announced that they were going to have their first Black Friday Sale for Exaroton.

Features
To host a server, one needs to create an account, and then proceed to start a server. According to the website, there is no need to pay for the server, and "There is no possibility to pay for anything." It also allows its users to install modpacks, which can configure the way its users experience Minecraft. Aternos also features a real-time console, DDoS protection, custom worlds and Automatic backups. In peak hours, Aternos can host up to 150,000 servers at once, with almost or two-thirds of the servers running in the cloud. Aternos also can translate its website to many different languages, being Portugese Portuguese(Brazil), Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, French, Italian, Vietnamese, Slovene, Slovenčina, Romanian, Filipino, Indonesian, Norwegian, Tagalog, Afrikaan, Dutch, Spanish, Eesti, Čeština(Czech), Svenska(Swedish), Russian, Hungarian, Thai, Hindi and Kashmiri

Reviews
Aternos has received an almost equal amount of positive and negative reviews, with a 2.8-star rating on Trustpilot. According to csskarma.com, it was "as easy as 1,2,3 to open up a Minecraft server", and wrote a largely positive review about it, especially praising Aternos for its automatic backups and that it was free yet stable, although it noted that there was a limited amount of modpacks that could be installed. On AlternativeTo, reviews of Aternos were mostly mixed (3.5 stars), with some criticizing Aternos for being laggy, while others commented that it was good for a completely free server hosting platform and wide range of modpacks. However, many websites saw contrasting reviews, e.g. A user on AlternativeTo said that there was almost no 'lag', while another claimed that there was a very high amount of latency.