Connect to your server
To connect to your server, copy the IP address and enter it in your Minecraft client, as a new server or with "Direct Connect". You can find the IP address on the server page with a click on the "Connect" button when the server is online. If this doesn't work, please continue reading this guide, otherwise: Have fun!
Is your server online?
Please make sure that your server is online if you have problems connecting to your server. The status on the server page should be green and be labeled with "Online". Also, try to refresh the page, and verify again that your server is online.
Try the DynIP
The DynIP is an alternative IP address for your server that helps you to directly connect to your server. Unlike the regular IP, the DynIP changes every time you start your server. To view the DynIP, click on the "Connect" button (i icon when using bedrock or pocketmine) on the server page while your server is online. Copy it and use enter it as the IP to connect to your server.
Why do I need the DynIP?
The Domain Name System
To explain this, you have to understand the Domain Name System (DNS). Every machine connected to the internet has an IP address composed of different numbers. Because humans are not really good at remembering numbers some smart guys invented a system to give names to these numbers, the Domain Name System. Every time you enter a domain, e.g. example.exaroton.me in your browser or in your Minecraft client, your computer looks this name up and finds the numbers behind this name to connect to the server. To look up the domain name, your computer asks a DNS server, e.g. at Google. If this DNS server doesn't know the IP address behind the name, it then asks the next DNS server, e.g. our DNS server, which knows the correct IP address. Every DNS server and even your computer save the IP addresses behind domain names for a short time to avoid unnecessary requests to other DNS servers. This is called "caching". Some servers have a caching time that is too long.
DNS & exaroton
exaroton has a highly dynamic system to allow you to start your server at any time. Because of this, your server always starts on a different machine with a different IP address and port number. To make it easy for you to connect to your server without entering a different server IP every time, we automatically create and manage a domain name for your server (e.g. example.exaroton.me). With every start, this domain name gets updated and points to a different IP address and a different port. Your computer looks this up for you like explained above. But if a server has a long caching time, the IP address and the port are not updated yet and you try to connect to a wrong IP address, which doesn't work. The DynIP lets you connect directly to the correct IP address and port, but because it changes with every start, using it can be pretty annoying.
How can you fix this?
Flush your DNS cache
A temporary fix would be to flush your DNS cache, so your computer forgets about all cached IP addresses behind the domain names. This doesn't help if a DNS server has a long caching time and it also only helps once.
Click here to learn how to flush your DNS cache.
Change your DNS server
To permanently fix this problem, you can change your DNS server, which is the first DNS server that your computer uses to look up domain names. You can use any public DNS server that you want, we recommend to use the Google Public DNS because it's reliable and fast.
Click here to learn how to change your DNS server. (PC)
If you are having connection problems on your phone, you can use the Cloudflare DNS app to easily change the DNS server, which is also more secure and faster.