I'm a bit late to this but LOTR survival is an absolutely amazing server. Honestly, it's gone downhill but still IMO the best lotr server (excluding the official one)

Age of Sauron is a good server

It depends on what your looking for. If you want extreme toxicity and pvp the official server is the best. LOTR survival is generally pretty nice, but has quite a bit of microtransactions. AoS I haven't played on in years but was pretty mediocre. I personally would recommend Darkness upon Middle Earth, as it's community is great, but if you care about staff being formal and professional it might not be the right fit for you. The best option, however, is to try them out for yourself. Just go down the list of servers and check each one out until you like one.

I am new to Minecraft

I have a question

Who is Big Alex

The official server when it first began was a good nice server it has become Toxic beyond belief I personally recommend lord of embers