We've recently gotten the Minecraft bug, buying three copies/memberships in the house. After playing solo offline games for about a week, I installed the multiplayer server software on my computer so we could enjoy a bit of cooperative play. The learning curve was easy, but I didn't think my machine had the proper resources to run it properly, so I got a month's worth of server time on a hosting service. This ended up being more trouble than it was worth - the host was often unreachable, and ran far more slowly than our own in-house server did. I cancelled the service and we ended up hosting a server at home.
This isn't about the poor hosting service (which will remain nameless), but something really neat we found to show off our little world. It's a free service that you upload your World file to, and they render a google maps-esque map of your world. It shows day, night, and cave views, and offers highly detailed zooming and scaling. They also host the map so you can show off your work.
http://mcworldmap.com is the place, give it a try and then give them a donation! While you're there, look up the Doodlebug map(s) and check our little virtual world out. :-)
http://www.minecraftworldmap.com/users/Electrodyne
