minecraft-optimization VS Waterfall

I'd recommend dropping the simulation distance and render distance and read up on this. Chunk loading is one of the most resource-intensive parts for the server - perhaps even the most.

You have troubles' guide

Follow this guide (read all carefully)

I have since found https://github.com/YouHaveTrouble/minecraft-optimization so I will be reading up on that too!

Looks cool. Any plans on supporting proxies such as BungeeCord or Waterfall?

So in this post we've created a Vanilla server, maintained and managed through docker. I highly recommend reading through the docs for this image as there's tons of configuration available, including support for modded servers. You can add more servers to this config and use something like BungieCord or PaperMC Waterfall switch servers ingame.

To explain the differences between the proxies, BungeeCord is the original proxy, Waterfall is "BungeeCord fork that aims to improve performance and stability" and Velocity is "The modern, next-generation Minecraft server proxy".

Look into hosting it. If you have extremely good hardware, do self hosting. Or if you don't and rather want to pay, use third party hosting sites. nitrado or g-portal can handle the loads most likely. You will also want to spilt the servers into multiple servers, and hook them up using BungeeCord/Waterfall or Velocity

I would always say that if you want to stick to plugins, always go for Paper. It's much faster than spigot (and here's the reason why), open source, and fixes bugs and exploits that spigot or upstream vanilla won't fix. It's a fork of Spigot, so you get all the features of spigot, and the lag reduction is really good on paper. I would recommend using Bungeecord or Waterfall as the proxy (which is a speical server software that allows players to hop between servers without having to join and quit. if you have played on network servers like hypixel, they use proxies, but it's on a more massive and complex scale), and use Paper or Tuinity as the backend servers (the actual servers you'll play on). Have the lobby server set as the default server, and either use 8 different servers or use 2-4 different servers with Multiverse and create 2-4 different worlds on within the servers.

Nah, look.

You can convert the server on MineHut to a Waterfall server that redirects all incoming players to your self-hosted server.

One thing I have been meaning to look into is a fork of BungeeCord called Waterfall. You could try that.

You need 2 servers running to achieve this but you make it appear as one if you use something like Waterfall.