Possibly The End?
It is very depressing for me to announce, the servers may have to close down. Please take some time to read this whole thing.
This year, we've made $3350.15 USD in total. If you divide that by the almost 5 months we've been through, that's about $670 on average each month. However, this month, we've so far earned about $75. This server runs off donations, I am only 15 years old, and have no job. I've been running these servers off my free time since January 2011, over two years and I do not want it to end like this. We need to make about $300 by May 18th to continue the server. If we can even get around there, I'll throw in some money from my pocket to help pay. I love running these servers, and many love playing them. Even the smallest amount of donations will help us out. Now, I am not trying to force you guys to donate. If I had a job I would pay for the servers, but unfortunately I'm not of age to even have a job in my country. I'm just asking, if you have some spare money and you care about the server enough to help pitch in a little to keep it online, that'd be great. You can use credit cards, PayPal balance, prepaid cards (can be found at convenience stores), etc. I'm going to edit some of the donator perks to try and make them better as well. If you guys have any suggestions, please send them to me on PvP.MinePlank.com with /mail.
You can see our progress of donations and our packages here.
About the MinePlank Series
This is sort of like an "about" page for our servers. MinePlank started out on January 21st, 2011 as one small, nooby server. Back then, Minecraft had just finished being in Alpha stages, and moved on to Beta. Also back then, there was no craftbukkit or bukkit (server software which probably 99% of all servers use), but there was something called hMod. I was only 12 years old back when I started the servers, and was really nooby with it at first, but cought up really fast. The first donation we ever got was on the same day that it started, which somebody had paid me $10 to be an owner, now though, I would never sell that. Minecraft clients (used for hacking/griefing) didn't really exist to the public back then either, so things were a lot easier. But eitherway, griefing always existed and there wasn't really anything good to use to prevent it. The server had around 5 people out of 20 around then, until one day we reached 20 people online, and I started literally freaking out. I even made a video, thinking my server was amazingly popular with just 20 people. Around June-August 2011, the popularity grew big time when I made it a cracked server and we eventually usually had 150/150 users, and I was making TONS of money, with our cheapest rank at $20. Then, I made a lot of changes to the server which people didn't like, and eventually our server stats dropped big time. I tried making so many servers to get people back such as the SMP server, Factions, Chaos, Creative, Free-Build and more, but none was working. A few months ago I made the MinePlank PvP server, which was a huge hit and was getting 88/88 before I closed it and merged SMP with PvP, which was a stupid mistake. Now it's back and still is pretty popular, but not as much as before. A little over a month ago, I started the MinePlank HG (Hunger games) series, which is now composed of 5 different servers which was a HUGE hit and is getting more users than I've ever had. For example, look at this video I just took (June 16th) of how fast the HG servers get people when they are open. In a little over 10 seconds, it was full with 64/64. We have 5 of these. I believe I can say, that we are now in our best stages, and most efficient ones. The highest price of something you can buy in any MinePlank server is $15, which is less than the cheapest one we used to have. We have lots of active users, and currently not many problems at all.