@Ghost Philosopher Since you have a hosted solution, you would only need BungeeCord if you wanted to host several Minecraft servers and jump between them with things like /server [servername]. If you're just hosting one server you want Spigot or PaperMC. I would recommend Spigot to start as it has fewer configuration settings and updates faster than PaperMC. PaperMC and Spigot are drop in replacements of each other so you can switch later on if you wish.
If you want to know why the "mainline" Minecraft server community is the way it is here is a short version of that story. It's mostly supplemental, but helps explain some of the oddities in the community like, why does PaperMC always update about 24 hours after Spigot?
There are 4 different things at play:
- Bukkit: This is an API originally developed by the people at bukkit.org. The Bukkit API can't actually be run as a Minecraft server, it's just a design standard for what functionality a custom Minecraft server needs to expose in order to run Bukkit plugins.
- CraftBukkit: CraftBukkit was also developed by bukkit.org and was the first actual implementation of the Bukkit API, meaning it was an actual Minecraft server that could be run. Plugin developers could write plugins that used features exposed by the Bukkit API and know that they would work on any server running CraftBukkit. Technically speaking, CraftBukkit patches or "builds" on the original Minecraft server code. The developers would make some modifications to the official
minecraft_server.jar and then populate the functions which the Bukkit API required, then publish that as CraftBukkit. It was not an entirely new server architecture, more of an augment or a mod.
- Spigot: Spigot came along a few years after Bukkit and CraftBukkit. The Spigot teams goal was to refine existing CraftBukkit releases to enhance performance. Spigot still adheres to the Bukkit API standard. They just modified CraftBukkit releases to run more efficiently and fix bugs that the CraftBukkit team handn't fixed yet. While some new features where added, Bukkit plugins still run on Spigot servers.
- PaperMC: PaperMC came a while after Spigot and does essentially the same thing that Spigot set out to do, except they modify Spigot's releases.
In 2014 the CraftBukkit team announced they would no longer be supporting the development of Bukkit or CraftBukkit. Minecraft had been starting to dwindle in popular culture which meant less developer support, straining the dev team. There was also some legal drama over CraftBukkit releases containing Mojang's official minecraft_server.jar code as it was again, just an augment. Since then, Spigot has taken on the burden of maintaining the Bukkit API, sort of CraftBukkit, and Spigot. Officially, they support the Bukkit API and Spigot and consider CraftBukkit to be sort of dead. There are new CraftBukkit releases, but only because CraftBukkit is apart of Spigot and it is easier to update CraftBukkit, then feed those changes into Spigot as was done originally then it is to try and merge the code bases. (That is my assumption anyway.) Spigot does not officially provide support for CraftBukkit and will tell you to use Spigot if you run into issues and need to report bugs.
Because the work that was once done by two separate organizations - CraftBukkit and Spigot dev teams - has been consolidated onto one dev team, the community paradigm has sort of shifted and PaperMC is generally now seen as the higher performing augmented Minecraft server implementation. This is not to say that Spigot is bad or slow, it just doesn't scale as well as Paper because it lacks things like Asynchronous chunk loading and incremental map saving. Personally, we started noticing this bottle neck when running 25 plugins, 5 worlds, and 20 players.
There are now several other "augmented" Minecraft server implementations which sprang up once CraftBukkit stepped down from their position in the community, but from what I see Spigot and Paper are the most widely adopted and plugin supported ones. There are still some concerns in the community about future legal action against Spigot or Paper as they could be susceptible to the same legal challenge that befell Bukkit, though that was a destructive move to the greater community before so most don't see it happening again.
Another note since I've already gotten into a lot of history, BungeeCord was the first widely adopted Minecraft server proxy and is still maintained by the lead Spigot developer, md_5, but the PaperMC team has since published their own "enhanced" version called Waterfall. WaterFall is to BungeeCord what PaperMC is to Spigot; a drop in replacement that claims improved performance.
