s e r v e r

Cloud hostings & Network
As someone who had a big budget for a network. Big networks aren't the best choice. For one, money drains fast when having a network. You would want a powerful hosting such as OVH (all branches of it), Reliablesite, Contabo, or AWS and other cloud hostings if you want to go fancy. My personal preference would be ovh as I have used it.


Shared Hostings
From my personal preferences, don't use shared hosting. Shared hosting comes up as sharing their own machines to others and make the price more higher than normal. MCProhosting is definitely not a good option, neither is bisect, melon cube, none of those. Any hosting that sells minecraft servers is a no unless you don't have a system admin.


Picking the right plugins
Picking the right plugins is going to be a good thing, I personally prefer custom made plugins as you can keep track of them easily and contact the right developers. Not saying all public plugins are bad but you want to watch out for the ones that cause memory leaks and heavy performance issues as you & your players would not want to deal with that.


Develops (optional)
Self-explainable, developers are godly. You don't have to have developers though, you can continue with your regular public plugins. Examples of these are TheSquadMC, the archon, and a lot of other servers.


Picking right people for the team
You often want to pick someone right for the team, same with developers. You don't want ones who are not active and reliable, especially when you need them. You also do not want many staff ranks, I learned that the hard way. Unnecessary ranks such as "Head-Helper" "Co-Owner". You also do not want multiple people as owners for a lot of situations unless you and the other people have great experiences in running a business.

A good loadout for my team would be this:
Owner(s) - Self-explainable
Admins - Admins should be the top tier ranks when it comes to staff ranks as you are basically a rank with a lot of perms, permissions comes with responsibilities.
Moderator - Self-explainable once again.
Trial Moderators - Trial Moderators or any trial staff rank is efficient, logging them is best for efficiency to keep track of what they're doing and how they can play their role in the team.

A key thing is to never have a lot of staff.


Budget:
Budget is a big thing for people. One of the first things is to never start a minecraft server with a very, very low budget ($12). Your server would die quickly as you won't have enough money to be more free with your server, as an example, no developers, no high-quality hosting, nothing.
When I ran my server, it cost $106 USD. Now that is low in itself. A reasonable budget would be about 1k or more, running a mc server to get competitive in the community is very hard. But an example of good money is 46 players from my budget. That goes onto advertising which is another topic.

Advertising
This is where a lot of servers owners fail. Advertising is a key thing to get attention for your server, advertising allows your server to grow a lot more. Good ways to advertise is to direct message, email, youtubers & streamers. Server lists are a good way too but are way out of the way of your budget. You can post your server on there. However, directly spending hundreds, if not thousands is not a great idea imo.

Conclusion
From a server owner prespective, these might not be the most efficient ways, but are some okay examples on how to run your network. I have not included unique features in here because everyone here in the thread has basically said along with donations.