I've noticed that a lot of people use services like Aternos to host cheap servers to play with their friends, even though they would like to play on a larger server, but dislikes not being able to contribute to the server and community, or lack the sense of control you get with a small server.
If you play on Hypixel or 90GQ, you blend into the crowd so easily. You don't have the feeling of making an impact that you get on smaller ones.

The plan is to be in the middle, and be a large enough server to almost always have someone online, but also be small enough to get the sense of a good community.