Quote:
Originally Posted by photon
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.
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That's quite interesting, and makes a lot of sense.
I take it that the industry of server hosting is still rather decentralized and hodgepodge, so not a lot of companies have that volume of hardware available, let alone more business to run off them after? Why not go through 5, 10, 20, or 50?
I'm just thinking with the sheer volume of servers sitting in warehouses everywhere it should be possible. The unorganized state of the industries hardware side is the culprit. There must be a better way to efficiently act on this massive influx of information (although screaming
'buy more servers and single player1111!!!one' in allcaps on blizzards website is probably not it).