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Originally Posted by ArchmageXin
People need to understand finance. Some MMOs can live with 500,000 subs if they are on 3 servers. Some MMOs can lose money if they put 10,000,000 people on 2,000 servers. If Blizzard built their servers to support 12 million players and suddenly it went down to 8 million, it need to to cut 20-33% of its support to match.
If not, they start losing money.
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Is that directed at me, because I do understand the finances and the balancing act they have to go through.
Anyway here is a little about what actually runs the game from a few years back, IIRC Blizzard outsources their servers from AT&T. This is overall, not per server, there are around 500-ish servers. I'd say they optimally hold 4-5000 people, but they could probably go up to 10k for lagtastic fun times, but that's just a guess.
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Apparently, in order for you to be able to log in whenever you want, it takes roughly 20,000 computer systems, over a petabyte of storage, and over 4600 people. Using multiple data centers around the world, this works out to a total of 13,250 server blades, 75,000 CPU cores, and 112.5 terabytes of blade RAM. They even monitor the weather in the areas where the data centers are, just to ensure that the servers don’t go down in the middle of that Naxx raid.
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