A server that runs well in month six is almost always one where somebody did these eight things in week one. None of them take long, and every one of them is much harder to add after something has already gone wrong.
Day one
- Turn the allowlist on
Even if you plan to open up later. It costs one command and it means the first week is spent building rather than moderating strangers.
- Op yourself from the console
Not from another player, and not by editing files. The console is the one place nobody can impersonate.
- Set the difficulty and the game rules you want
Before people build habits around the defaults. Changing
keepInventoryon day thirty is a negotiation; on day one it is a setting.
The first few days
- Set up a nightly restart with warnings
Five minutes of setup that pays back every week you run the server.
- Set up a daily backup and test restoring one
An untested backup is a hope, not a plan. Restore one into a spare instance once, so you know the procedure before you need it at midnight.
- Install only the plugins you can name a reason for
Every plugin is a thing that can break, conflict, or stop being updated. A short list is not a limitation; it is why the server still starts next year.
Before you invite anyone
- Write the address down somewhere permanent
A pinned message or a channel topic. You will paste it fifty times otherwise.
- Decide who has what
Operator is the highest power in the game. Two people having it deliberately is a decision; six people having it because they asked is how worlds get deleted.
Read the console before asking anyone anything. Almost every problem announces itself there in plain English, and the ones that do not are much easier to describe once you have ruled the obvious ones out.
The most common backup story is not «we had none». It is «we had them and they were empty», or «we had them and nobody knew how to restore one». Ten minutes now, once.