Back in 2018, I had just finished school and was on the “‘let's start a Minecraft Server” vibe, seeing the growth of large Minecraft servers and all those dreams of being able to pay bills with a Minecraft server. I had been playing Minecraft intermittently since version 1.2.5 (released on April 4, 2012), at least its the oldest version I remember playing, started with a couple of friends on a server running on an old PC at home, to than needed a way to keep it only 24/7 without my electricity bill going thru the roof. While researching where to host it, (I wanted to host a prototype for free at the time). I didn't find any other platform that fit my needs (this mainly being some level of “advanced” and full file access instead of pre-approved plugins, as was the general practice at the time). So I was like since I will have to invest money on this server from day one, why not try to make the platform I was looking for?