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Out of curiousity (and reading an article about Second Life) for those in the know, approximately how may users per server (not cluster) do you use for scaling factor? The number reported for Second Life seems absurd (5 / physical server arranged in clusters of 20-40).

If that is a realistic number, how they heck do folks make *any* money?

-Frums

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The article mentions that EQ2 handles 116 users per individual server machine at peak usage. (5th paragraph)

Assuming WoW is about the same, WoW has 6.5 million users, and (wild guess here) 25% of those are on at a time at peak times, that's a peak of 1,625,000 users online simultaneously, so a requirement of about 14,000 servers.

But with each of those 6.5M users paying US $15 per month, that's $97.5M of income every month... let's call it $100M to make the math easy. That would give you a budget of about $7,000 per server per month, assuming 100% of your income went to hardware costs.

Obviously the real monthly cost per server is significantly less than that, leaving lots of money left over to pay for staff, bandwidth, and Profit!

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