The full list of states
Your server moves through several states over its lifecycle: Provisioning, Installing, Initializing, Starting, Running, Stopping, Restarting, and Stopped. Most are self-explanatory, but a few are worth understanding in more depth.
Provisioning & Installing
These appear together the first time a server is created, or after certain reinstalls — Spawnly is still setting up the underlying machine itself, before the game software is even in the picture. This is normal and typically takes a few minutes.
Initializing
The underlying machine has booted, but the game process hasn't started yet. This is usually brief.
If a server stays stuck in Initializing or Starting for more than 30 minutes, an automated safeguard deletes the underlying machine entirely and resets the server to Stopped — clicking Start again provisions a brand new one. Because the machine is deleted rather than just restarted, anything that wasn't already saved in a backup is lost. This is exactly why taking regular backups matters, especially before a software or mod change that might cause a boot failure.
Crashed: a state within a state
"Crashed" isn't one of the top-level statuses above — it's a separate game status that can appear while the top-level server status still says Running. That's not a bug: your underlying machine is genuinely still up and billing as Running, but the game process itself has died. The dashboard reflects this with a distinct Crashed indicator, and Start/Stop behave as if the game were stopped, even though the machine underneath it isn't.
Stopped
The game process (and, for hourly billing, the underlying machine) is fully powered down. No usage is billed while a server is Stopped.
Next steps
If a server keeps crashing or getting stuck, check Managing Backups & Restoring Your Server so you always have a safe point to roll back to, and consider opening a support ticket if the pattern continues — see Support Tickets: Getting Help from Spawnly.