Interesting post from WoW general forum.

[Kevin]

If they're referring to anything other than the ISP costs, that sounds like utter BS to me. I see no major legitimate costs for running servers after the hardware is bought and the system is fine tuned.
Sensationalism... and throwing money at it isn't going to do much.
On the general topic of outsourcing servers, the idea seems absolutely ridiculous to me, especially when contracts are involved. I'm not saying Blizzard didn't do it, I'm saying it's really stupid if they did.
[right][snapback]70930[/snapback][/right]

Yeah, outsourcing makes no sense. Though the person very well may have meant colocating which is probably what really happened.

It's plausible that server problems are ISP related. Of course Blizzards network engineering and network coding track record isn't the best either. Since each server is a cluster in itself there is a lot of network coding and set-up that has to go into this.

Another possibility really is bad server hardware. I still shudder when I think about the first couple of Dell servers we got in here for our exchange servers. We worked with Dell for months trying to figure out the SAN failures, the network issues, the crashes. Since it was an exchange server there was also the work with MS and the fights between "Its the software! It's the hardware!". We eventually had to scrap them and started running our mailservers on whatever hardware we could throw together. Went from the 2 Dell servers that server the whole campus (though not very well!) to something like 25 homemade boxes. The Dells did work great without any problems at all up to a certain loading level. Then they had hardware issues. Pretty much every piece in the boxes were replaced during the months of testing. We find out later that we had servers number like 5 and 8 off the Dell assembly line for that model number. Other locations soon started having other problems with them as well. Dell did not have another equivalent model server that would really suite our needs at the time and since they are a business and weren't going to give them too us new ones and we couldn't afford to buy anything else anyway (we literally had some old desktop systems running as mail servers when we finally decided to cut the losses). Other sites had similar problems with the same servers and others were running higher loads than we were and had not issues at all. Hardware really can be that squirelly. Those old Dells (since Dell would not take them back) are now running as non critical FTP servers off site and are highly under utilized for what they could do, but won't.

We have some Dell servers again now and are running a lof of VMWare servers on them they are rock solid and doing a lor more than the flakely ones that pretty much were rebuilt from the inside out several times. Hardware really can be that squirelly and it really can take a long time to track it when there are a lot of other factors. And it really can take a lot of money to just kill the old and replace with new. It still doesn't mean my patience isn't running thin, and it still doesn't mean they couldn't have handled things better. I know we could have done better than we did with our situation here, but I do have a tendency to cut them some slack.

Oh well that's enough of a ramble.