During this past Summer , I was lucky enough to spend the better part of a week at a nice house on a small lake with some family (parents + 3 siblings and their families) and our kids (5 kids between 11 and 6) were obsessed with playing local co-op Minecraft with each other. Not wanting the minecraft magic to end when the week did, I set about simple ways to keeping their games going. Microsoft sells realms access for about $8 a month, but I wanted to see if there was a simple way to quickly spin up a cloud server for less.
A blog post detailing the project can be found HERE.