Mojang have now announced that the UK and Netherlands have Minecraft Realms.

yay, Realms are now available in the Netherlands and UK!

— Daniel Frisk (@danfrisk) March 25, 2014

Essentially, Minecraft Realms are multiplayer servers hosted by Mojang, for which you pay a few euros a month. It has quite a few advantages over hosting your own server, for example that they run 24/7 without you having to have your computer running the server all day, you don’t need any technical knowledge about setting up servers and of course it’s very reliable. They also keep regular backups of the server.