We have not a huge community but we have a lot of complexity to our setup, a lot of resource demanding features. So we've needed quite a beefy server over the years, not just in CPU and RAM but in storage.

One of the things we've found with dedicated servers is you either get a great SSD and no hard disk or a lot of storage but no SSD. We like to never wipe our map so we instead have been slowly expanding it since 2012. This increases our storage demand for our worlds beyond the usual SSD's these servers come with (128GB we would blow right past).

Then the other concern is backups. We also have a MySQL database that is enormous because since we keep our worlds so long we also need to log the changes made by players in that world for a very long time so we can go back and fix griefing. Block logging alone is over 90GB on our server and players have placed and destroyed more than 4 billion blocks over the past few years. Where do you store this data?

We also have a large website, forum which receives a lot of traffic. So essentially we have a lot of demands but as we're not a pay to win server and offer players no ranks or in-game money or items for donating we don't run at a profit, we run at about a 50% loss.

Which means paying for the kind of server we need would be very expensive. We would have to pay for a lot more than we need because there's no perfect server that would just fit for us. I think the perfect server for us would be a quad core, 256GB SSD + Dual 2TB Hard disks.

So anyway what I ended up doing was building a server at home. It's a six core XEON with 64GB of RAM, Dual SSD's, 6 x 2TB in RAID6 (internal, for backups) and another 1 x 4TB (external, for backups also), and it has a UPS and so on aswell.

Most of this hardware is stuff I already had to keep costs low. Then for internet I have a home business line which I would have anyway with or without the server so its price is inconsequential. The only real month cost that is incurred is a bit more on the power bill, bit more on our AC usage, Anti-DDoS protection (which is still way way lower than we'd pay for even a bargain OVH server) and the price of replacing failed hardware which is mostly just fans and disks.

Now I'm telling you this because you asked what we did, I'm not suggesting you go and do the same as we did, we are a special circumstance and most servers aren't in the same predicament we are with the long retention, requiring lots of rarely accessed storage for player data and so on, it's just what I came up with and our setup has saved us quite a lot of money over the past several years.