Earlier, I asked you "Cheeseburger picklenut?" and your answer was "42." I was just wondering though- what if it was in winter?

LOL ^

(((24*2) - 3^4 + (35/34) + (2*15)³ / (3*9)³) * 30.65429763)

How much money does it take to run a Minecraft server?

To run a server... it cost few bucks. But to run a server with hundreds of players like Minetown... it gets a bit expensive, but the donations cover the cost plentifully. Ignoring all the advertisement, it cost around 100$ per month at the moment and will soon cost an additional 300-500$ per month when the cluster will be installed. It's "cheaper" because we own our hardware instead of renting it.... So instead of renting something 1000-2000$ per month we invested 16000$ in hardware that now belongs to us and we pay for the datacenter hosting only.

Where did you start with your server? with the site? I did have an amazing server going, kinda small, 20+ on at a time, but we stopped, and im currently writting some plugins, and other stuff, and plan to bring it back. But this time, im having a hard time on where to start. I want a site, but im not ready to pay monthly for one ifmy server ends to a fail. I just need to get back on my feet, a new way to start. Any tips i could use?

When I started on Minetown, the community was around 50-100 active users, with 20-40 online players most of the time. 3-4 months later when I became owner, the server was averaging 60-80 players online. At that time there wasn't the amount of plugins there are today and managing and moderating the server was much more harder that it is now. In December 2010 - January 2011, we were receiving too many applications per day, more than 200, our staff at that time was just not able to handle that much, it was almost a full time job to review the applications. So we put in place a 5$ whitelist to resolve the issue and to get more mature members.(money doesnt equals maturity, but still, the majority of people who were willing to pay 5$ to join the community were more "serious" players than those who wouldn't) The system worked, although we kind of missed the opportunity to grow even bigger, but the quality of our community was much greater than the average Minecraft server. Then after some time more plugins came out providing us with more options. The application system came out and we removed the 5$ whitelist.

I guess this is more a quick "How I started" than "Where I started" answer..

But to answer your question more precisely, the first thing I worked on were the plugins. They are what compose the features of the server, so they're definitely one of the most important parts of it. And.. you have to get the basis set up... back ups, rules, website.. etc. Once you have all this set up you can start working on promoting your server.

Although... the Minecraft scene is evolving quickly and there are more and more servers. It wasn't the same when Minetown started; And time is an important factor in the equation of success.

Starting a server nowadays isn't the same as starting one 2 years ago. There is a lot of competition and promoting servers gets harder and harder every time.

About the monthly website fees... you can't really get away from them if you wish to own a public server. Unless your minecraft host let you upload web files or that you own a VPS or a dedicated server, your best alternative would probably be Enjin or some other free forum hosting. There are also 2$ per month shared webhosting deals... but again it depends on your knowledge in webhosting.

Hope that answered your question even if I got a bit sidetrack at first, but I guess it was still worth mentioning.

Question One:

How long do you tend to stay as owner and remove your rank to someone else? And if you were to give up your ownership, who would it be and why?

Question Two: Are there any new ranks that you think may be added to Minetowns cummunity?

Question Three: Do you think the economy is horrid at the minute? Meaning that everyone has diamond and everything is super cheap?

Question Four: Do you think the ammount of staff that is currently on Minetown is a good ammount or would you say it is a big ammount of mods?

Will you ever get bored of minetown...

I want your word that you wont.

When you first joined in Minetown, what was the first place you built on or lived on? If you lived in a town, what was it called?