It's kinda cool how a $5 VPS (Linode Nanode) is able to run a vanilla Minecraft Spigot server for like 6-7 people and still can serve some basic stuff just fine. I get monitoring warnings about >90% CPU usage sometimes, but everything is more or less lagless.

Time to try hosting some other games: CS1.6, Doom Classic, and UT2004 up next.

"Vanilla Spigot" = "Jumbo Shrimp"

It's all fun and games, until you start building redstone and multiplying villagers. Those are the two main sources of lag, and 1.14.4 is massively inefficient.
I have yet to try Paper though, apparently it's Spigot on steroids when it comes to efficiency (or so they say)

@AlgoRythm @endor we're more or less beginners at MC, don't want to play with mods or fancy stuff yet. Still just getting into the game.

Besides I can always upgrade the VPS as needed, but right now it's doing fine.

@RememberMe oh we don't use any mods either, it's just a matter of performance.
Vanilla 1.14 is laggy af, and even Spigot still struggles every now and then. Lately I've been looking for ways to improve our small server, and I've stumbled on Paper, which claims to have even better performance than Spigot

@endor I'll check it out, thanks!

I used to play minecraft with the kids. We built a village and I taught them about capitalism by hoarding all the gold..or trying to.

I wasn't very good at it, but the youngest one out of the five was absolutely RUTHLESS.

She burned my bakery to the ground while I was offline and left a note claiming it was her sister.

And then charged extortion prices for wheat and bribed her brother into destroying his wheat crops in order to force the rest of the group to buy from her at a higher price.

Land claim restrictions and combine with rules requiring building only in the small designated area that we defined as 'town' meant it was impractical for anyone else to farm. And at this point she had accumulated so much bread that if anyone tried to start selling it she'd just flood the market and put them out of business.

We had 6 players including myself, occasionally 2 others (my niece and nephew) but it didn't take long until everyone left.

Kids are ruthless.