Minecraft discussions

I notice three mods which seem to yield good results: Hey0's, iConomy, and Towny. Hey0's does a lot of stuff. He has a Wiki that seems helpful. iConomy adds a currency system which is fun. It lets you sell and buy items through signs placed in game, among other things. Towny lets you start towns that limit who can build in them, etc.

I don't know much about setting any of these up - aside from Hey0, which is just a replacement for minecraft_server.jar. I spend most of my MC time on RP servers, and I see these plugins/mods a lot.

As for hardware requirements.... MC runs off of Java. Java burns memory like a peach. I haven't seen the memory usage of a server with 20 people online, but I am fairly certain it is less than the client. I think internet connection is more important than the machine's RAM because the server does not handle any images.

But I am not a computer expert, so don't quote me on this.

Edit:

I heard that each user online requires 300 kb of upload.