@teresat
Oh dear. I recall when I started hanging on servers there was this one server I was hanging on often. I made a very very efficient mob spawner when we transferred to 1.0.0, too efficient actually. We ended up having like 100 zombies in a 1x1 block area so the server started to lag terribly.
Usually I play on a server called smashcraft (mc.smashacraftonline.com), it's not very good but not bad either just under managed. I live in a sealed off ravine underneath ice sheet were I have grown a farm, a garden and keep animals far out in the winter wastelands.
There are just so many servers and most of them are over protective, such as password to leave spawn. My geeky dream is to get a better PC to support a server myself. I already got a very pretty map, that have bukkit supported builds. I want my server so be an open one but with a build trial kinda.