Originally Posted by Riffraffselbow

I probably go through about a tb of download/month on my cable connection, company doesn't complain. I realize that upload is different, but if the server is at a server farm that shouldn't be too much of a problem. I can't imagine the server costing more than about 150-200 dollars a month, and with so many supporting members (probably 10-20 logged on to just the PR server at any one time, more like hundreds total) it shouldn't be too much of a problem.

I could be very wrong, though.

You are very wrong. With rare exceptions we don't rent "game servers" from resellers or use virtual private servers. We lease or co-locate physical boxes in Tier-1 datacenters. The cost per month for just the server is about double your estimate.

A terabyte is a LOT of transit. I would be very surprised if you actually went through that much per month. But you are just guessing at the amount of bandwidth you use so it's not a real comparison.

When you're using multi-terabyteS per month (as in, ~10TB) both up and down on a Tier-1 backbone it's different than your typical end-users bandwidth consumption on a cable modem.

Keep in mind we're only talking about a single game server here. There's a lot of other non-gaming infrastructure too. DNS servers, mail server, web server, database server, data backup server, and a development server. Those are all PHYSICAL boxes too. We don't even want to talk about how much bandwidth the main web server consumes with over 4 million page views per month.

At the end of the day, it's cheaper to provide the services half-assed, but this community has survived for a LONG time in part because we don't do things half-assed. The services we offer and the infrastructure we use is deployed with no less consideration than a corporation in terms of availability, security and overall system integrity.