are minecraft realms worth it

Well, Realms are stable, but like every one says, you have no control what so ever over mods, plugins or any thing like that, i would suggest hosting your own server and run either "vanilla" original minecraft server or "bukkit" all tho, you might have to compile it your self or get it at "getbukkit.org" which in my mind is "not safe" since i didn't compile it and check the code my self but im sure it works for some.

I have managed and hosted 8 servers at one point in my life and hosted one of them for over 3 years straight, it all started with my friends playing around in vanilla minecraft, and then my brother shared the URL everywhere and all of a sudden we had over 300 players at all times 24/7 which where very hard to handle by my self and a friend with hardware breaking/burning always staying ontop of things, plugins gets updated, minecraft got updated and everything around that, players started griefing, backups were made every hour, phone calls from around the world when something didn't work, players got insulted, really bad, even police were involved at some points, and logs, ip's and even player data were sent in order to match the insults with the insulter. It where just a hasstle, but still if you're only going to play with friends, use a white list no matter what and stay safe hosting.

If you would like to see some footage of my server, you should YouTube search "Masternet.se" and yea that's my server xD I think there were about 18 episodes of my server getting griefed and about 100 times in total griefed.
Luckily i got backups at those points xD