Quote:
Originally Posted by ShaolinFlame
I totally understand this argument and I haven't been angry or anything like that. But with the way internet architecture is these days couldn't they have rented a whole swath of backup servers for a week? Or would the work involved in something like that not be cost effective? Everybody is talking as if they would have had to buy all of those servers and eat years of extra overhead, rather than a short period of lease fees. Is that really how it works?
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Hard to say for sure without knowing what kind of hardware they need for how many players and how much effort they put into being able to auto-deploy new servers and stuff.
But leasing a few servers is easy, with the # of players we're talking about though we'd be talking about leasing a HUGE # of servers for a short period, but the company that's going to lease them has to have something to do with them afterwards in order to pay for them.
If someone came to me and asked to lease 2,000 servers for 1 month, unless my typical growth is such that those 2,000 servers are going to be leased by someone else soon I'm going to charge pretty close to what they cost me to buy.
I could be overestimating the # of servers Blizzard needs, but given how popular the game it just feels like you'd be dealing with huge #'s of things which makes it really hard to just spin up capacity at that scale.