Donations used to be fair and cost no more than $10/£10. You would get a few perks and that would be that. Then some servers got out of hand and started charging for every Item, and perk in the game. I once even saw a donation for $500. Maybe if some of these server owners wouldn't of gotten so greedy, this could have been avoided. It's a good thing Mojang stepped in, so hopefully all the crook servers will be forced to close. I'm all for a one off small donation, but some are just too excessive.
And it's not like hosting a server is so expensive you need a $500 donation anyway. It would cost you about £20 a month for a 100 Slot server. I used to be fine with Donations, but they got out of hand, and they can only blame themselves for it.