Well, let me preface the first part of my answer here by saying you SHOULD NOT OPEN THIS LINK WITH INTERNET EXPLORER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. Yes, this means you. The site in question is hacked often and they tend to end up with keystroke logger programs to stick to your machine. Now, provided you followed my advice:
Here's FFXIAH.com's database on server population by AH entries
Provided you didn't follow my advice and clicked it anyway, let me be the first to laugh at you. One of my oldest friends on Diabolos just ended up on Titan server with his name changed, all his HQ staves sold off, and his gil emptied. He was using a firewall with IE, too. You really only have to ignore that one warning message...
As for race, people say different things. Min/max'ers would like you to believe that if you play a certain race for a certain group of jobs, you'll have the best possible stats and always succeed. Others tell you to pick whatever race you don't mind seeing constantly because you will see that race constantly unless you really love 1st person perspective, (please don't play in this). I'm more of the opinion that having a particular race combo allows you to do different things with different jobs. For instance, as a Taru SMN, I can kite a mob pretty much forever with carbuncle. Even if Carby wasn't free at this point, there's a good chance the mob would be long dead before I ran out of mp to keep an avatar summoned. My linkleader, Finathlon, is a Galka SMN. Yeah, he can't keep things out as long just by running around out of range while the avatar solos it. What he can do that I really can't is get up close and melee with the avatar. His Spirit Takers actually hit for decent damage, he also can take a hit if he pulls aggro. If the mob AEs, he'll live through it just fine. Me, I'm a bit more fragile. I'd like to melee, but if I take aggro, I'm probably a hit or two from death. HE'll never have as big of an mp pool as I will, but he can keep it filled by doing more DoT than I do and using that one staff WS. Same deal with other jobs, Taru PLD plays a lot differently than Elvaan PLD. There are situations where you'd value both of them.