Hello! I am ckhawks, owner of currently Hawkcraft Prison and Hawkcraft Games. I have had lots of experience with servers, and am here now to share some of that with you. There are many crucial aspects to your server you will require, a spawn, staff, permissions and plugins, etc. I will start with the spawn. With your spawn, it's the impression to your players, and could be what makes gem decide to stay or not. You want your spawn to be extraordinary, open, and give a lastly impression paired with a "Wow!". You want to have big open spaces for your players to run around. Also, it seems nice to have these easter-egg like features for your players to find or "parkour" to. Remember, you cannot make a spawn (or anything of high ranking) in a shirt period of time, it will take a while, and don't rush through it. I've had to remake spawns many times because I've rushed through it. Next, we move to the staff aspect. Staff are a tricky matter, in the fact that people can be decieving. I personally use google docs to organize my applications for staff ranks. Have fields like: -In Game Name -Age (they could lie, but this doesn't matter a whole lot.) -Answer some rule (ex for prison servers: what re contraband items?) -Time played on server -Current rank -A secret answer hidden in rules -Experience with If someone currently says they're admin or whatever on multiple servers, they're not what you want. They will not dedicate the time you need to your server. Avoid these. -Why they want the rank (to show dedication) Lastly, we talk about your plugins and permissions on your server. I have one key thing to say right now, avoid using /op at all costs! There are issues involving people giving themselves operator status through ForceOP, and, players can betray easily. I recommend using PermissionsEx for your permissions plugin. It can be confusing in ways at first, but the wiki is good to refer to. I cannot explain how to use it here, it would be too long of a process, and I would be rewriting! Now, for plugins make sure that all parts of the plugin work as planned before allowing players to use it. I have a testing server setup on my computer to test this. Thank you for reading, if you have any questions about anything server related, Minecraft related, or even computer related feel free to ask! Bye!