Hello everyone, I'm Vector. Today I will be giving a few tips and tricks to help you improve your servers quality.

Planning
Starting your server is where all the planning happens. Some people want a survival server, some want a factions server, and others would prefer a mini-games server. Make your server how you want it, just remember this, don't rush it. I've been on a quite of few servers, and I can tell you right now.. they only spent about an hour or two on theirs. Now I'd understand if it was a server just for the owner and his friends, but most of the time it isn't.

What Do I Need To Do?
Spend more time on making your server. Making a square with a floor layout as a spawn, is not what most people are looking for. If you look through the PMC forums you will see the more successful builds have either tons of detail, or is something new that no one has seen before. If you want to create a survival server for example.. make it unique. Some servers make there servers roleplay to enhance the survival experience, others have custom ideas that also enhances the game play. Another thing you could do to improve your server is to go through each plugin and ask yourself "Do I really need this? What would this do to my server to be beneficial?" If you say no to both of those questions, then it's most likely unneeded. Another thing a person could do as owner is go through each plugins folder and look at the config file. If you go through Essentials config file, you will see tons of options you can enable, and disable.

Staff Members
Finding the perfect staff is nearly impossible. That's why you need to hire people who you can train to fit your needs, and your server needs. If you think about it, your staff make up your server.. not you. If a staff abuses a player, that player will most likely leave and tell his or hers friends what happened on the server. If you want to try to get good staff, make a professional application. If the person who is applying only adds a few sentences and doesn't give much information or has grammar errors, then that person should not be staff, no questions. If a person can't go through an application and add information and detail.. then that person should not be staff at all. A person you should look for as staff is someone who spends quality time on there application, making sure it's the best it can be. Remember, if they can't spend time to add detail and or look over there application to make sure there isn't any grammar errors, then they are not for you.

How can I be a better Owner?
If you want to be a better owner, you must watch how other owners treat there servers. I'd suggest going on a server with 50-100 active players, and see how the server functions and stuff. If the owner is on the server, watch what he does and maybe jot down notes on something that can benefit you as a owner. If you want to be a really good owner, you must construct strict rules that you will enforce 100%. I'm not talking about if you break a grass block you're banned; but if you break something that does belong to you, you're banned for 24 hours, no exception.

First Joining Players
When players join your server, they are going to spend 10seconds-10minutes on the server till they answer the question they have in their head.. "Do I want to stay, or leave?" This is really what kills most server owners, is the amount of active players. If you want a player to stay you must stick to everything I have said above. Whenever I join servers these days, I get in and I have no clue what to do. What am I suppose to do? Read the rules? Go out and build? Follow a pathway? How do I play on this server? Is there anything I should know about this server? I'd suggest to have a book be given to a player when they join with all the information they need. If you don't like that idea maybe hook up command blocks a pressure plate or something like that with the appropriate description.

Enforcing Rules
As you all know the average Minecraft player age is between 10 and 18. Just from looking at the ages you can already tell you're going to have trouble on your server. People will threaten you, people will cuss at you and your players, people will break the rules. That's why I talked about having good staff above, without good staff you and your server will go down hill. In my opinion I don't like banning, I like jailing and muting, unless the player is threatening someone or the server in any way. If a player does that I will ban there account.. and ip address. No matter what you do to your server, there will be that one person that will test your server to the limits, so be prepared.

Players Getting Bored?
Are your players saying they are bored, or have nothing to do on the server? If they are you need to take action, and fast. When a player gets bored, they will tend to go on another server.. leaving yours in the dust. We don't want that, do we? If you don't then you must think to yourself "What can I do to make my players love my server and stay on it for a long time?" If you have a survival server, add mini-games as another option for your players. If you have a factions server, do something unique that you haven't seen on any other server, such as have night be crazy. When it turns night all aggressive mobs will spawn in the real world. Get creative with your server, add more stuff if people say they are getting bored.

Donations
This is something I seriously want to talk to you guys about. Don't ask for donations, don't beg for donations. Forget about donations for right now, you don't need them right at this very second. A lot of the servers today will have ranks for donations going from $1 to $100. You don't want to worry about donations until you get active players on your server. I have been on a server where the owner would beg each player that joined to donate. It was pathetic and I left right away. If you want to make your server just for donations, then you might as well not make a server.

Being Straight Up Annoying
Staff these days like to be trolls, even the owner sometimes. One time I was building my house and one of the staff members thought it'd be funny to light it on fire. Wanna know what I did? I left. If you are a owner and a staff member is doing this, warn him. first. If he does he again, kick him off the team. You will lose players if you do stuff like this on your server.

Taking Care Of Serious Situations
If someone griefs, you don't go out and about and tell them in full caps "YOU GRIEFED BOBS HOUSE, YOU ARE GOING TO BE BANNED!" If you do that, people will think you're immature and act like a 8 year old. The right way to do it is to inform the player in private chat that you have on logs that he destroyed another persons property. If they tells you they did, warn them.. if they lie about it, then jail them.

Communication
I'd highly suggest getting a website or forum for your website so you can communicate with all your players what's going on with the server. If you don't do this and your server goes down, what will the players do? I bet they would most likely move on if the server isn't up within 24 hours. If you need help making a forum or website please message me and I'll guide you.

Graphics
Something important is the graphics that are produces for your server. If they are cheesy and just complete crap.. then I doubt players will want to join. Why do I say that? Most people today look for quality for quantity, so that means you have to step up your game and improve your graphics for your server. You will know if it's good or not, try to compare your graphics made for your server, to graphics made for the topped ranked servers. Creating a banner is another important thing. This is the first thing a player sees when they look at your server. I'd suggest making an animation banner saying what is on the server. Not a paragraph of what's in the server, but a basic few words. Look at my banner, I put my logo in there, add lighting effects to the background, and made it animate. I did not add random colors like bright red, green, or orange. I kept it modern, and sleek.

Sorry if this is a lot of information to take in, but I am wanting to help people improve their servers out there. Thanks for reading and if you have any positive feedback about my blog please post in the comments. If you don't have anything nice to say then don't say it.