Are there any Everquest servers where I can level at my own pace?

Lemme get this straight, you want to do all the original starting city quests on a single character? You do realize that all starting quests are not available to all race class combinations don't you? And that's not taking into account the faction issues. What you need to to leverage the Persona system because you will never ever be able to do what you profess to want to do "in era" on a single character

I don't know what mental gymnastics made you think you should be able to do this, but it's wrong. You are asking for a game design choice around a literal unicorn and saying it should already be in the game. This is an absolute waste of dev time. Solve your issues either with personas, alts, or shrouds. It's just that simple.

Deleveling certainly is an option left to me. I lose a whopping 0.3% of a level, if that, per death at the lower levels. In the meantime, even on any of the progressive servers or (likely) P99, I'd be making well more than that per kill. I can understand that most of the player base and devs here enjoy very quickly overleveling almost all of the content in the game so that they can /godmode on for almost everything within. I certainly can die 100+ times per level at these lower levels. I'm not about to spend any time with /decay for these corpses, though. I should probably summon them all into the guild lobby just to show how ridiculous this is. Shrouding doesn't work, as it adds all of that experience to the character as soon as the shroud is taken off (multiple levels, yes, I've tested this). I will likely end up creating a higher level mule to park dead on top of the lower level characters at all times.

Bind yourself in lava every night and go to bed with the game running.

You lose like 10% per death. Calm down with your hyperbole. Confirmed trolling at this point. Good job OP.

At high levels, certainly. I'm referring to deleveling from the 51st through 5th levels, though. This process would take over six hours and leave behind hundreds, if not thousands, of bodies. I'll admit that the deleveling from 10th to 5th levels is completely obsessive on my part and doesn't serve much of a purpose, but those levels alone require hundreds of deaths. At the lower levels, you're most certainly not losing anywhere near 10% of a level per death. I've done this before and from 6th to 5th level, you're losing 0.3% of a level per death, if that.

Give Firona Vie a try, OP.