How to Make a Great Minecraft Multiplayer Server (With Tips)

There are literally thousands of Minecraft servers out there. Some of them are awesome, but most of them are junk. I started my Minecraft server from scratch knowing nothing about how to run one. Today my server is very profitable with over 80 people on at peak time, and it is growing.

In this guide I will share a few things that I learned so that you can make sure your server is in the "awesome" category. Read this if you are interested in learning how to get 100s of people on your server.

Note: This covers Bukkit servers for the most part, but some things like advertising can be applied to any server type.

Step 1: The first thing you need to do is rent a server. A server hosted on your PC is okay if you want to play with one or two friends, but if you are really serious about building a large community you need to have a 24/7 server with good performance. I started with a host that specializes in Minecraft servers: http://www.multiplay.co.uk/. They provide a nice interface for setting up your server/plugins and have helpful staff if you have problems, but are a little pricey.

After your server becomes popular I suggest looking into dedicated server hosts (check out my guide on picking a Minecraft dedicated server host here). I currently use razorservers.com for my Minecraft server and haven't had any issues.

Tip: Make a website and forums as soon as possible. You can use a blog site like Blogger or Blogspot to have a place There are plenty of free forums out there like http://www.freeforums.org/. This will help you build your community and it will make your server look better.

Tip: I highly recommend buying your own domain (I use http://x.co/getwebhost) as early as possible. Not only does it make your server look more professional, but if/when you change to a new server all you need to do is point your domain to the new host IP. It doesn't have to be .com. Something like yourserver.us or .net is a lot better than 213.22.62.124:25565

Step 2: The next thing you should do is pick a theme for your server. You can have one theme or a variety. Themes include survival, skyblock, factions/pvp, creative, prison, and more. If you are unsure about what theme you want to do, try checking out sites like http://minestatus.net and http://mcservers.org to see which server types are the most popular. Also, some of the servers will list what plugins they use so you can download them for your own server.

Tip: If you want to build a large server, it's best to have a theme that many people enjoy playing. For example a server that is focused on, say, building cat pixel art, will probably not end up attracting very many people.

Tip: Having multiple worlds, each with a different theme can attract more people to your server. For example you could have one world be for survival, one world for skyblock, and one world for creative building.

Step 3. After you decide what you want to make, its time to install plugins. Some basic plugins that I think every server should have are (read the tutorials on each plugins website for how to install and set them up):

• PermissionsEx: This plugin allows you to setup permissions for players. You should setup a Guest group for new players, a Member group for people that you will allow to play on your server, and an admin group for you and the people controlling the server. You can add additional groups like donor groups.

• Essentials: This gives you a wide variety of commands that every server needs. I recommend using EssentialsSpawn to easily set your server first time and respawn areas, and EssentialsChat to format your text.

• WorldEdit: This plugin can be tricky to use, but can be very powerful. It allows you to quickly add and delete large spaces and copy/paste large structures.
  
  
• WorldGuard: This plugin lets you protect areas from being altered by other players. This is necessary for your spawn area and other areas you want to keep safe. Also you can use it to protect players' work so it can't be griefed.
  
  
• CoreProtect: This plugin logs every action taken by players, and lets you rollback things that players have done. So for example if player A destroy's player B's house, you can rollback player A's actions and restore player B's house. There are similar plugins like logblock, but I like this one because it doesn't require setting up MySQL.
  
  
• Votifier: This plugin lets you reward players that vote for your website with items/currency in game (we will go over voting sites more later)
  
  
• PetitionPlugin: This plugin allows users to submit tickets if they are having a problem so that you can fix it. I like this plugin because it lets you teleport to the location where the petition was submitted.
  
  
• AutoAnnouncer: This plugin lets you display messages to your server every few minutes. This is good for advertising about voting or for giving out information that you think players should see.
  
  
• MyWorlds: This plugin lets you have multiple worlds, highly recommended if you want to have multiple themes on your server (skyblock world, creative world, survival world, etc).
  
  
• MultiInv: This plugin will make it so that each world has a different inventory. Great if you want to add an extra creative world for people to play in but still keep things balanced.
  
  
• NoCheatPlus: This plugin requires a bit of tweaking, but it will help you prevent hacking and cheating.
  
  
• SpamGuard: This plugin will automatically kick spammers and ban repeat offenders. It is highly customizable so find something that fits your server style.

Tip: As your server grows I suggest looking into plugins that remove join/leave/death messages and limit chat by worlds. It's the only way to have 100+ people on your server and still be able to read the chat. Check out HideStream and DeathTpPlus.

Step 4: Once the server is running and the plugins are setup, you need to start designing a spawn area. I can't stress enough how important it is to have a decent looking spawn area. The first thing that people will see when they join your server is the spawn. Just like first impressions are important when you meet new people, having your spawn be creative and catching could mean the difference in someone staying on your server or leaving. This is especially important when you have a fresh server with no players. I suggest having the server rules on signs at the spawn so that new players will know what to expect. There are also plugins that require a user to read rules or hit a special sign to become a member.

Tip: Make your spawn look good, but make it simple to get through. If your spawn is complicated and people don't know where to go, they might get frustrated and quit.

Step 5: Once you have your server up and running and a decent spawn area, you need to start advertising. First you should make a post on the official Minecraft forums: http://www.minecraftforum.net/. Make your post nice looking and informative, with pictures if you can (of your awesome looking spawn area). Your title should give your server name with some info about your server. For example "Extreme Madness Server [20 slots][24/7][pvp][extra llamas]"

During the first few days, bump your post every 30 minutes or so if possible (it's better if you say something creative like welcoming people new to your server than just saying "bump", as forum mods don't like that).

The next website you should post on is http://planetminecraft.com. Post the same information that you posted on the official Minecraft forums. This is a great website to get visibility on. It's not unusual for me to get 10-15 new players on my server within minutes of bumping my planetminecraft.com post. You can only bump this post every 24 hours, so I suggest bumping it during your server prime time so that your target audience is more likely to see it.

After that you should post your server on the following voting sites and vote for them whenever possible (which is usually once a day).

• http://mcservers.org
• http://minecraftservers.net
• http://minestatus.net
• http://minecraft-mp.com
• http://minecraft-server-list.com
• http://www.mc-index.com/

Remember to make your post stand out (a custom banner helps with this) and be informative. Download Votifier and pick a listener (http://dev.bukkit.org/server-mods/votifier/forum/vote-listeners/). The listener will let you give out items or in game money to people that vote.

People will make an effort to vote if they get something for it.

Tip: Don't log into other servers and spam for people to join your server. This is just rude and will cause your server to lose credibility. Be patient and the people will come.

Tip: Give out worthwhile items to people that vote so that they have a reason to do so, but try to keep it balanced!

Step 6: Find a staff to help you if you haven't already done this. You will be busy making sure the server is running, but somebody will have to be there to fix the small problems ("The server lagged and I lost my favorite diamond shovel!"). I suggest posting an application format on your minecraft.net forum post or on your website. Don't accept just anybody, and don't make anybody OP unless you absolutely trust them. Use a permissions plugin to make a moderator group that has certain powers.

Tip: A lot of people are going to ask you to be a moderator. Some of them want to guininely help, some of them want to just have power/fly, and some will try to use that position to grief. Pick moderators/admins carefully because they will be the face of your server.

Tip: Be a good admin: Be nice to people, don't destroy their stuff, and don't mess with them unless you are sure they are enjoying it too. Be fair with your punishments, and don't get mad with power. People like admins that they can talk to and are on their level.

Step 7: Once you have your server setup it will be time to watch it grow. Advertise as much as you can and keep encouraging your members to vote. Upgrade your server whenever it needs it (if you have any time where your server doesn't have any empty player slots it's time to upgrade). Try to be be nice and make friends with other server owners. The more people like you, the better your reputation will be and the less people will attack you.

Some extra tips:

• If you plan on having a really big server I suggest checking out Spigot or Craftbukkit++ which are two alternatives to the normal bukkit server. They provide much better performance than the normal server when you have 100-200 people. The downside is they take a little longer to update.
• Get cool looking banners and pictures for your server to use on your forum post and the voting sites. There are a lot of freelancers that you can pay to get nice stuff done, or ff you want to give it a shot yourself it's easy to find tutorials and free programs on google (try "gimp").
• Look into DDoS protection for your server (I learned this the hard way!). It is becoming increasingly easy for anybody to get their hands on tools that can bring even large server to their knees. It can be expensive to protect yourself from large attacks, but if you have a profitable server it might be worth it. If you are suffering from small attacks, there are some free things you can do like configure your firewall and setup your domain name (if you have one) to run through a service like https://www.cloudflare.com/.
• Be on the lookout for griefers or people that will otherwise try to harm your server. As said before, use WorldGuard and CoreProtect to defend yourself and fix any damage.