Pretty close. Our current setup is a 4790k @ 4.7ghz and 32gb of ram in a dallas, we will soon be moving to a 6700k @ 4.7ghz and 32gb ram in new york. It's not a huge upgrade, but hopefully it will give me the chance to rethink how I do some things. Our cpu is our main limiting hardware factor, it also happens to be one of the best performing ones for minecraft that money can buy. It's not cheap at all, but that is why we push donations. There's no amount of money that would magically up the render distance, and due to server crashing when we had it anything above 5, I don't think it will be going up until something changes. I would expect that mojang would be getting on the issue asap, but hey, they did take 289days, 17hours, 46minutes just to mark one of my bug reports with "done" and post this "_/=\o_" in the comments.

- Crafty

When I get some time, I will be changing the particles and adding some hats.

No, just a few blocks you can wear on your head.

You won't likely be getting end rod as hats can be taken off and used as blocks, we have to keep to cheap stuff like glass, pistons, leaves and the like

Being able to buy them is out of the picture.

You can log chests and other storage items, if the chests were in a gm2 room and you had the right key, it could work just like a personal storage box that you see in banks.

However, there is issues with this:

• Too much indestructible storage for players, why would you store any valuables in your base where they could be raided.
• Each double chest would require an admin to lock it.
• Players losing their homes is already a big enough issue, players losing their keys would become an issue.
• You take on all the risks of a real bank, robbery, natural disaster, systems failure, so much could go wrong and the stakes are really high.
• It would take a lot of time to setup.
• What would happen when someone leaves the server, what do we do with their stuff. The old server at about 100k players, even if just half of the players bought a storage chest, we would have 50k double chests. Even if you could have a solid block of double chests, it would still be about 200-300 blocks square, excluding the fact that no one would be able to reach their chests.
• How would you find your chest, at first it would be easy, but after we have 50k of them, it would be impossible.

It's a cool idea, and I have definitely thought about it before, sadly, I don't think it will happen though.