Advice on making a new server?

Make sure you get reliable ad-dons that people are going to want to use on your server. For instance, say you only had standard weapons instead of M9K(Which is my personal favourite), People are going to want to use weapons that actually work and look good. Not some standard HL2 weapons.

A good advice for you, if you have a problem probably someone else had the same or similar problem so google EVERYTHING.
It will save you a lot of time.

Try to be unique, get a good but small collection of addons.

Also, have some sort of gimmick, like unboxing to make your players stay for longer.

Be a nice guy, don't attempt to be bigger than anyone and make sure not to make enemies out of big server or they'll probably DDOS

Be creative, develop custom stuff, be inovative and don't make a generic DarkRP server with 80+ addons.

Anybody whos joins the server in infancy and asks for admin don't give it to them they will more then likely destroy and player base you may have so far.