6 years ago, I thought to myself, wouldn't it be nice to have my own server with a few friends to play with. I went to the first link on google and bought a 256MB ram server from BuyGamingServers. For the first month, we had a couple of reoccurring players that brought life to the server but nothing very big. I worked hard to make my own home system that used a slow red stone clock and command blocks. It was so bad that even a small amount of lag would cause the clock to freeze and the whole thing to stop working. Over the next month, player counts increased as I added more features to the server like TPA and the trading post. Month 3 came around and now we were on the first page seeing up to 15 players online concurrently.

I thought it was time to upgrade the server, I bought 2gb of ram but nothing happened, I tried to reach support but no answer, further investigation into the owner of the hosting company showed he had gone to jail for fraud. The fate CraftyMynes hung in the balance, with less than $50 in donations I grabbed all the server files and moved them to a dedicated host with 32gb ram and high-performance CPU. It was a scary time, I was still in high school with not a lot of money to throw around.

With this new hardware, the server ran so well. Players started to come in droves, by month 5 we had 4 tab lists full and still no lag. More and more features were added while critical systems were upgraded to handle the increased demand. By this time we had key contributors who were able to financially support the high cost of the hardware. Less than a year into the creation of the server we saw the next big upgrade, top of the line, highly overclocked 4770k with 64gb of ram and high-speed storage. The server was like butter, 88 players no lag.

Then came the wrath of mojank and feature creep. Each release we saw huge reductions in performance along with critical bugs causing players to be kicked out of the game for hours with no way to log back in. After much testing I found the problem to be heavily impacted by MCMyAdmin, it was time to make my own panel. It started out as a small test but has now become an absolutely integral part of the server. It now runs the TPA, homes, particles and heads, chat filter, server AI, backups, and much much more.

We now run the best hardware money can buy and have the best panel built explicitly for the server. We have many great staff and players of all ages. It's so amazing to see everyone together even when we are so far apart.

I would like to thank all the staff who have been with me from the start, and the ones who are with us now, CraftyMynes would not exist without you. To all the donators, your contributions have let us continue to use the best hardware that money can buy. Last but not least, too all the players that have been here from day one or just joined, voted 1000's of times or just once, each one of you has helped us become the best vanilla server 6 years in a row.

To celebrate 6 years of your support I would like to give back, from now till the end of the month everything will be 25% off. I hope that anyone who has not been able to donate due to these hard times can get a chance. Thanks again to everyone, your support humbles me, here's to another year of CraftyMynes