How to Start, Stop and Restart Your Server Safely
Starting, stopping and restarting your server are the three power controls you will use most, and doing them in the right order keeps your world from losing progress.
2 min read · Updated Sep 24, 2026 · By GuavaHost Team
You will find these controls at the top of every page of your server in the control panel (sign in at customer.guavahost.com, open My servers and click Manage). When the server is off you see Start; while it is running you see Restart and Stop, plus Force stop for emergencies. The coloured status next to the server's name tells you the current state, usually Offline, Starting, Online or Stopping. The buttons are locked while the server is starting or stopping.
What each button does
- Start boots the server from an offline state. The Console fills with the startup log, and once it settles the server shows Online and is joinable.
- Restart stops the server cleanly and then starts it again in one action. This is the safe way to apply most changes, such as a new config file or a plugin you just uploaded.
- Stop sends the shutdown command and waits for the game to save and close on its own. This is a graceful stop, not a hard kill.
The safe way to stop
Always use Stop or Restart rather than closing the browser tab and walking away. Those buttons send the game's own shutdown command, which gives it a chance to save the world and disconnect players tidily. If you just close the tab, the server keeps running in the background; nothing is saved because nothing was asked to stop.
Many games also accept a stop command typed straight into the box at the bottom of the Console, for example stop or end. That does the same thing as the button.
Force stop, and when to use it
If a server is frozen and the normal Stop does nothing after a minute or two, click Force stop and confirm. It kills the process immediately, with no save and no clean shutdown. Treat it as a last resort, because a force stop during a world save can corrupt files. If you have a recent backup on the Backups page, you have a safety net.
A simple safe-restart routine
- Warn any players in-game if you can, so nobody loses unsaved progress.
- If your game supports it, type a manual save command in the Console, for example
save-allfor Minecraft. - Press Restart and watch the log.
- Wait for the status to return to Online before you try to reconnect.
Why restarts are healthy
Game servers gradually use more memory the longer they run, especially busy ones. A quick restart clears that out and often fixes creeping lag. Rather than remembering to do it by hand, you can automate a daily restart with Scheduled tasks so it happens at a quiet hour while you sleep. See Setting up an automatic daily restart.
If a server refuses to start or hangs on Starting, do not keep mashing the button. Read the last few lines of the Console instead, because the error is almost always written there in plain text.
Still stuck? Jump into our Discord at discord.gg/GuavaHost and the team will help you out.
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