1. who creates and maintains these servers?
Volunteers. You can find out about them on the console tab of the electrum window.
Mostly they pay for it themselves. They take donations too but it doesn't amount to much: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/recooperating-electrum-server-op-costs-the-free-market-way-573951
You send all the addresses in your wallet. They then reply with the transactions involving those addresses.
Yeah, there are limits of how many addresses you can lookup or something. That is why you have those numbers next to the server names in the server selection window.
No, multibit doesn't rely on centralized servers. It uses bloom filters which are a clever way of asking for transactions from lots of full bitcoin nodes and building up a picture from that.