Flash Server? Costs?

Recently, I was in a conversation with Sentharn (Nartashi) from the BattleOn forums. He has his own server, so, in order to understand if Artix Entertainments was paying unnecessary costs, I asked him about his server and about their servers. In this conversion, this was his explanation for their payments of $2000 monthly per server.

[Sen]"Mo, my 'server' is just a computer I took the extra hard ware out of and set it next to my desktop tower. I could take a picture of the simplified hardware if you want. But it's just an old Dell tower case. Theoretically, I *could*, but it'd be real pointless on dialup."

[Me]I'm asking because I'm almost sure that AE is paying unneccessary amount of money

[Sen]"Hehehe, Mo, no they're not. Let's take AQ as an example. Let's assume each scene is roughly 300KB--probably more, but that's my guess. Now assume five players are playing per minute. That's 1.5MB of bandwidth per minute, not to mention five players downloading files, authenticating, etc. That's probably an underestimation, but whatever. Now, you probably know how often the scenes change. Five scene changes/battles, and that could theoretically be 1MB per player.

So we have 5MB in 5 minutes for just five players. (Really gross underestimation) Also, although you might think of servers as not needing much hardware--you get several dozen or more simultanious connections per minute, you *need* as much memory and CPU as you can get. Also, take into account that they probably have to store many GB--possibly more than a TB or two--of data, and they probably do it on a secondary server at the least. There's power into consideration too, as in electrical power.

And think of AQW, where data is not only being downloaded, but uploaded at the same time, tracked by the servers, and re-sent to each client. That takes CPU and RAM space, lots of it. And you can't host that on your home DSL line. That takes pipes, big pipes, probably 100MBit pipes, and the only real place to find that is with rackmounted servers in a datacenter--there's more cost right there, the cost of personell in the data center, HVAC, etc...

But even with all that, the main problem is really bandwidth. Sorry about the long-windedness, but there's no way, say, my Pentium 4 server--2.0GHZ single core, 1GB RAM--could be used for anything but a small-mediumish website with medium-low traffic, even if I had a decent connection. Although it would make a *great* IRC server..."

This was all on IRC. So I hoped you at least learned something. This is why servers cost as much as they do, especially on huge flash games that are constantly updated.

Sincerely,
.Mo