Is it Easy?

The first question that almost always comes to a potential new server owner's mind is "Is it easy?" The answer is, no. It may be easy if you get someone to set it up for you on an easy and simple hosting provider, but if you don't have the cash to have one set up for you then you're stuck and setting it up mostly on your own. There are so many things to take into consideration that I'm sure I'm not even going to list all of them. Knowing that many viewers are going to be bored by too many words I'll try and keep it simple.

Server Hosting!

It's important that you find a hosting provider for your server that's both reliable and easy on your wallet. Most of the time these go hand in hand. The more expensive sometimes the more reliable, so you have to weigh your options and figure out which route you want to take. There are a lot of hosting companies that have a very easy to use panel that's minecraft friendly. For a new server owner that barely understands how to set up plugins, this is pretty important. By having a user-friendly and simple panel to use it'll make the plugins easier to install and easy to figure out.

Plugins?

There are so many plugins out there that it will take me the entire week just to list them all. I personally have a Bukkit server, so the plugins I personally know are Bukkit approved. You definitely want to start with the basics, such as Essentials and a permission plugin. I use PermissionsEx as my permissions plugin. It depends on your server, what you want to do with it and what you want to offer. For Survival servers you'll probably want to provide LWC so their chests/doors/signs will be locked and helping prevent at least some griefing. For Games you'll definitely need plugins for each game you'd like to proved. For Hunger Games I recommend the Survival Game plugin, I've had barely any issues with this plugin. For PVP you'll need to choose between Factions or Towny, or just go straight vanilla. For creative you can look into either a flat world where your members can build anywhere or offer them something like PlotMe.

Then you'll need to figure out what you want to give your members. What cool perks? Do they get to turn into a mob at a certain rank? What will you give them when they donate? You can either find plugins that have some cool perks or other things, but we can get into that later.

Spawn!

This one is tricky. There are some servers with such beautiful spawns, but no players or a lot of players. Sometimes the spawn's beauty doesn't matter to be successful. I personally think it'll help to give players the 'Wow' factor when they first join. It's important to give players information in spawn. Rules/rank information/what your server is about, etc. Or at least have a list of commands somewhere where they can get all of this information.

Ranks

You'll want to give players an incentive to stay. I recommend that you offer different ranks for members to achieve some way or some how, like building or playtime, etc. Each rank should offer a unique or a unique set of perks to make players want to rank up. By giving them these incentives they'll want to play more on your server, bring your server average numbers up, etc. This one is tricky because it's entirely up to you to offer different ranks or not. And if you do, what do you name them? You have to come up with something interesting and cool sounding to get players to go 'Yeah, I want to be that!'

Staff?

You'll definitely need staff on your server to help run things when you're gone. You don't want to fall asleep only to wake up and find someone was advertising on your server while you were away and stole all of your players. (Unlikely that all your players will leave, but you never know ;)) It's important to choose mature and willing staff that are on at different hours and who are polite and friendly to the players. You don't want rude staff. Rude staff will not encourage players to stay on much on the server and will turn and leave. So be careful who you choose as staff.

How to get players? How do I keep them?

This is perhaps one of the trickiest things and I'm still trying to master it. If you have a server set up that's running smoothly with little to no issues then you should probably start advertising to bring in players. If your server isn't running smoothly then you probably want to fix your issues before advertising. Some great free places to advertise are server list websites. PMC is one of them and there are a few others that will let you advertise your server for free. You can also get your server sponsored to be on the front page at the top, though there are other ways to help make your server more noticeable. Many server lists offer a voting system for your server. The more votes you have, the higher chance you'll get players as your server will start to move closer to the front page. Votifier is a clever tool that I use to give my players rewards for voting. I definitely recommend doing this to help get the most votes every month (many server list sites reset votes at the end/beginning of the month.) By giving them rewards they'll be more likely to vote.

But now the tricky part. How do you keep your players? It's important to listen to each and every member and grow based on their feedback that they give you. If they say they don't like something and a lot of other players agree, then maybe you should change it or make it better. Offer them rewards for playing more, or staying loyal to the server. Why would they want to stay if there's nothing they can gain from staying? It's also important to have a great community. If you have players that are cursing back and forth all the time and setting bad examples, then maybe you don't want ot keep those players on your server.

Thank you :)

Thank you guys for reading! If this is a success I'll try and write some more blogs a bit more in depth as to each subject listed above. I run a small server myself called Whichcraft and we're steadily growing. Got to start somewhere, right? :)