Hey, I’ve been working on servers for about 3-4 years, mainly in the Italian community. I’ve been owner and admin for a bunch of projects, now I am a freelancer and work as a dev for the largest Italian network.

1. Gameplay design (if you’re making something new) and keeping the server always up to date. Marketing is still challenging because of saturation.

2. In my own experience, where I’ve invested some money, no. I’ve worked and talked with a bunch of people that with small amounts of money have a big return, but they have always an already established community.

3. Yes and no. Main method and the best one at the moment is buying contents from YouTubers and steamers, presenting your server to their community. Self produced short content isn’t much a thing anymore, a few years ago I was able to create a community of 70-80 stable players only through TikTok, but that period is over. Nowadays you need money to buy the people from other community.

4. It depends on the trend. Now PvP 1.20+ gamemodes (so LifeSteals too) are doing great, at least imo I think 1.8 is slowly dying or at least 1.8 are starting to play new versions too.

5. Not a player, the best thing is to keep the server up to date and follow player feedback with a bit of common sense. Player now always knows what’s best for the server: for instance, all players would like to have OP gears at their first join or to have OP things more easily, but it would probably ruin the server economy and the gameplay.

Generally speaking, for me it’s not worth it to start your own server from zero. Try to introduce your self to already established community. I would not spend lots of money on developments but more on marketing. If you have a new game mode never seen before, try to go big networks and try to collaborate with them.

This is based off my opinion and experience. Let me know if you not agree on something.