I wanted to say that there are a few other features that will make people's lives easier. I'll give a quick rundown of the features:
First of all, we have the standard IRC services you'll find on most networks: NickServ, ChanServ, MemoServ, OperServ, BotServ, and HostServ.
I'll go thru a quick rundown if you're not familiar:
NickServ - similar to Q on quakenet, registers your nick. It allows you to 'own' a nick, in other words if someone tries to use your nick and they don't log in within a minute it will forcibly change their nick.
ChanServ - similar to L (and Q for big channels) on quakenet, registers a channel. This is better than L since it can hold up to 1024 users in the list (so 1024 users for autovoice/op/etc).
MemoServ - lets you send memos to other registered NickServ users. (Quakenet has nothing like this). If they're not one it will send them the memo as soon as they arrive and identify with NickServ.
OperServ - similar to O on quakenet, mostly for use by IRCops (server administrators). Used to send announcements, recover lost passwords, that sort of thing.
BotServ - allows adding server-run bots to users' channels (another thing quakenet doesn't really have). They do various fun things like games and what not. (Think fishbot, though we can 'define' different bots and such).
HostServ - allows giving users custom vhosts which will appear in their whois and anywhere a hostname would appear.
For example, username@i.love.cows (or anything of your choice).
I will post commands/info on how to do various things like register your username, login to your username, register a channel, etc.
The IRC server itself has a lot of interesting / useful settings that quakenet doesn't have, for example:
30 character nick limit
Halfops (The % symbol, mode +h, a lot of people asked about this)
Other modes for users like protection (&, mode +a, prevents you from getting kicked/banned/etc), channel owner (~, mode +q, can add other owners / protected users)
Channel modes such as +G (G rated channel) it will replace swear words with <censored>, good if you have little kids around or such.
Excepts and invites (modes e and I). Excepts allow a user to be 'excepted' from a ban, for example if you ban the mask *!*@* no one can get in. then in the excepts list you could add users you want to allow in. Similar use like if you ban an ISP but want to let certain users in.
Invites allow people to directly join a channel without an invite even if the channel is +i (invite only). Few irc networks actually support these 2 things (though mirc has commands to control them)
SSL connections, if you want to have a secure connection to IRC.
/knock command if you want to ask for invites in a +i channel.
Built in flood protection / join throttling that you can set on the channel. There are other settings like to prevent people from changing nick while in the channel, prevent unregistered users from joining, etc.
Anyway, I could go on for a long time about this. As far as lag, my lag is about half that of what it normally is on quakenet.
Check the server out -- we hope you'll enjoy.