On the 20/1/2012, Sky Servers officially opened to the public. Sadly, due to some issues with the permissions plugin, the server didn't really get started until the 22/1/2012.

Now, some 10 years later, Sky Servers is one of the oldest continually running Minecraft servers in the world.

Back in 2012, there were no major Australian Minecraft servers. There were however, a lot of small, more private ones. Sky Servers was started with the intention of being Australian hosted. This wasn't cheap back then and so the original server was hosted in the US.

I think it is difficult to put into perspective the substantial impact that this server and community have had on many people’s lives. Players from 10 years ago still come online today to say hi and catch up with people they might not have talked to for years. People have met online and got married in real-life. Others have made life-long friends and connections. Many staff have used the skills that they learnt on the team to apply for real-life jobs or pursue interesting careers in similar areas.  Going back through old news posts to put together this post, it is quite amazing to look at how many people have helped to run Sky Servers – especially those other than the survival server.

Some maps of the survival server would see over 48,000 players joining – an astounding number and not even something that is matched by larger servers today.

There are far too many people to individually thank for making the last 10 years possible. Running this community has been a massive team effort. It has been quite the ride and you never know where it will take you. Thank you to everyone who has played a part, no matter how small or large, in making Sky Servers what it is today.

So, here is a very brief 10-Year rundown of the major events that make Sky Servers’ history:

22/1/2012 - Sky Servers officially opens

22/1/2012 - Modding360s and Onix_Qwerty are the first two players to join

22/1/2012 - Cheese510 pays $5 to buy the chestshop perk

10/2/2012 - The current ranking system was introduced

18/2/2012 - www.skyservers.net is registered as a domain name

22/2/2012 - The Creator rank is officially introduced

17/3/2012 – First zombies minigame is hosted on survival

27/4/2012 - Sky Servers reaches 40 players online and 250 registered members

5/5/2012 - All server data and files are sadly lost when the host's HDD dies

10/6/2012 - Sky Servers opens a dedicated Hunger Games Server

12/6/2012 - Time for the very first map reset!

24/6/2012 - Due to the expensive cost of Australian hosting, features like the nether were disabled. We managed to implement a system that allowed the nether to be hosted on a different server that was hosted in the US. This is now common-place using bungee but back in 2012, this system pre-dated even some of the largest servers having this ability. The developer who made the system went on to become lead-developer for the largest Minecraft server in the world.

12/7/2012 – Sky Servers Paintball opens

26/12/2012 – Sky Servers Tekkit releases, managed by mrfrase3

15/8/2012 – Sky Servers Survival moves to a dedicated box.

26/8/2012 – Sky Servers Tekkit opens

16/9/2012 – 90 players online

11/11/2012 – Sky Servers PVP opens

9/12/2012 – Sky Servers Events opens, combining Hunger Games and bringing Skyblock for the first time

27/12/2012 – Sky Servers Survival has a second map wipe

7/1/2013 – Sky Servers FTB Opens

13/2/2013 – Sky Servers does the Harlem Shake! Anyone remember this fad?

27/2/2013 – Sky Servers reaches 4,000 registered members

5/4/2013 – Purchases of perks are finally automated. Previously, when a player purchased something, they would have to wait for hurcoli or myself to apply the perks and ranks ingame

5/4/2013 – Sky Servers reaches 5,000 registered members

10/4/2013 – Sky Servers adds a Team Fortress 2 gamemode to the Event Server

22/4/2013 – The Event Server is setup with bungee so players can move servers without logging out

8/6/2013 – Sky Inspire (the builder team) release their first creation – Temple of the Terran Seasons

2/7/2013 – Sky Survival reaches 100 players online

8/8/2013 – Sky Servers FTB moves to FTB Unleashed

26/8/2013 – Sky Servers reaches 8,000 registered members

15/10/2013 – TNT Run is added to the Event Hub

9/11/2013 – Sky Servers adds a Hide n Seek gamemode to the Event server

16/11/2013 – Sky Servers reaches 10,000 registered members

5/12/2013 – Sky Servers adds a Quake server to the Event Hub

12/12/2013 – Sky Servers Pixelmon opens - PixelMC

7/1/2014 – Sky Servers FTB Moved to FTB Monster mudpack

3/3/2014 – Sky Servers reaches 15,000 registered members

28/4/2014 – Sky Servers PVP 2.0 releases

19/5/2014 – Sky Servers opens an Agrarian Skies Server

12/4/2014 – Sky Inspire opens a public Server

17/8/2014 – Sky Servers reaches 20,000 registered members

8/11/2014 – Sky Servers FTB Monster closes

6/2/2015 – PixelMC opens up an Adventure Map server

26/3/2015 – Agrarian Skies server closes

5/4/2015 – PixelMC opens up Pixel World

23/5/2015 – Sky Events changes to SkyHub with creative, prison, PVP, Skyblock and SkyWars

21/6/2015 – Sky Servers reaches 25,000 registered members

6/11/2015 – Sky Servers FTB closes

28/8/2016 – Sky Servers reaches 30,000 registered members

22/9/2016 – Sky Servers PVP rebrands to AusPVP

22/2/2017 – Brand new Logo is unveiled

27/3/2017 – Sky Sharman is introduced

1/8/2017 – PixelMC Closes

1/9/2017 – Sky Servers goes EULA compliant due to the demands of Mojang. Potentially in my opinion, the biggest mistake. This change was not easy and has resulted in pretty significant impacts for the community since this date. The impacts it had on the other servers was considerable, making many of them financially unviable to run.

16/12/2017 – AusPVP Closes

19/12/2017 – Cosmetic crates are introduced to the server

15/1/2018 – Kings and Queens is added to SkyHub

22/1/2018 – Tomographix promotes _fluent and M4S0N_129 to run the server while taking a backseat in the day-to-day management

11/6/2018 – SkyHub closes due to lack of popularity

20/6/2018 – Sky Servers reaches 35,000 registered members

2/12/2018 – Tomographix returns to manage the server

2018 – Present – Sky Servers focuses on running the Australian hosted survival server.