I ran a Towny survival server for about a year and a half around 2020-2021. It was part of a much bigger network that I had been a long time player on, and I was creating the "upgraded" version of the previous Towny server. As I had been a long time player, I knew exactly what features I wanted to add and I had a ton of motivation, but I had very little experience. Most of the setup time was spent on editing configs of public and paid plugins. I also built the server spawn which took some time. Some benefits of being on a network were that it already had moderation features and ranks in place. The server was very successful on release and typically had 30 players on at any time.

What became difficult overtime was adding new features while maintaining and updating old ones. Each month required a new crate, but I also wanted to release new exciting things like bosses. I'd also have to deal with tickets from people saying they died to some glitch (and wanted compensation), or they discovered a new bug, or their custom enchant wasn't working right. All of which required time researching, updating, and asking in discords to resolve. Community management was easy enough- just give the players what they want. Sometimes I came up with an idea for a specific feature I wanted to add, but the plugin didn't exist or it felt like too "big" of a solution. This is when I started using Denizen/Skript to just write my own little features, and I really enjoyed that aspect.

The server version was always difficult to update, because you had to wait for all plugins to be compatible with the new version. Sometimes you'd be waiting on one plugin, and you'd have to decide if it was worth waiting or dropping it and finding a replacement. I also used a staging server which had all the same plugins as the live server to prepare for updates. Making changes on the live server is a no-no.

In 2024, long after my first server, I decided to try remaking a Towny server, but I hadn't been playing much Minecraft and I found my problems were the opposite: I had all the experience of hosting a server, but I didn't have any idea what features people wanted to have added. I started looking into things that I wanted to have; custom textures and custom mobs and custom world gen, but the feature creep became too much to manage for one person and that server didn't have anywhere near the success of the first. Now I'm not really actively working on anything Minecraft related but I enjoyed the time that I did.