Maintaining a minecraft server

As a server owner, it may be fustrating picking staff, managing plugins, adding new features in all the time, soon you'll become stressed and will panic since your fellow server members are starting to "yawn" most of the time.

Maintaining a server can be tricky for beginners with no experience of owning one can seem to look easy owning one; simply answer to that, no, it is tricky maintaining a server since you want to keep your players happy and enjoying their time on the server meaning people are following the rules of the server and playing along with the theme (e.g. people making a town on a factions server).

The first step to owning a server is payment, you always need money to pay for the server, many servers you see now-a-days last for a month due to the lack of donations and money, if you want to own a server you need money, thats the absulote number 1 requirement for a server, unless its public hosted or its free for you (friend paying for you).

Staff, you need trained and knowledge staff to help you run the server smoothly, you can hire moderators to moderate the server whilst you work on plugins or the website, or maybe a co-owner who is in-charge whilst your not online. If you have a staff abusing their powers, dont say "It doesnt matter, we all make huge mistakes", no; you need to punish them; they are not wise staff to choose niether have the power to take actions. If the staff are nice and always there to help, players will feel safe and happy as they wont get upset by someone breaking the rules on them (e.g. disrespect).

Fair rules, players mainly like to follow rules so they dont have the ability to do "anything", they can feel restricted, having rules like troll always, isnt really a rule, its just an order which most players which not to follow; Fair rules like no disrespect or hacking is always a good rule to have so people wont go along being rude to others, it may even be a 8 year old playing, who starts to cry, or hacking to cheat like xray

Updating the server reguarly is mostly a need, people will get bored overtime, you eventually need to add new features to the server to increase gameplay and enjoyment on your server otherwise you'll see lots of people leaving

Dont Go Around Other Servers Advertising; this means your server is rubbish as no-one is joining it since it looks rubbish/crap, going round other servers makes you look "stupid" when your in-need for players, advertise on a forum, not on other servers or you'll see. BAM! Ban Hammer Has Spoken!

This concludes how to maintain a server, this may not be all of it, but defiantly the basics.