I still think it's overkill, but then again you know better what your needs and requirements are.

Anyway, the bottom line is, if you are going to need that many servers and so much bandwidth, then you are going to make about 10 times as much, so I don't think that should worry you at all. I am assuming, of course, that you already have the a few hundread K to spend for advertising and people to create such an MMORPG that will bring 10K people online at the same time.

No, I don't have that level of finance, but it's a target if takeup is good enough - and the design should theoretically scale up to it quite well.

My bare minimal setup is a single box running the DB process and a single master server process - I seem to remember costing this at around $400 per month on 10Mbps balanced unmetered. That was a while back, so I'd have to re-evaluate the precise figures- but I have sufficient finance allocated to run 3 or 4 boxes at that level for a few months. To be honest I can probably get away with even less so long as the provider can up the bandwidth at short notice.

Without a ready system and full stress testing in a LAN environment, I've not spent too much time looking at the live costings - they seem to be dropping in general so by the time I'm ready, these figures will be well out of date.

10 mbps is overkill, 1k players online, using a resonably effcient network protocol should take maybe 2-3 mbps (up and down combined).

Unless you have a lot of financing available to market your game, it can take years before you go over 1K players simultaneously. We are online for more than 2 years, and didn't get that many yet.

I agree - my benchmark was with the figures that were used for Warhammer.
I'd be very interested to know how you advertised, and what your takeup rate was (both for usage and subscription). Of course, Warhammer also assumed a HUGE advertising budget both targetting Games Workshop's customer base directly (a potentially very large captive market) and general gamers. I'm really looking forward to seeing what Mythic do with the license.

Personally, I have a few contacts I can potentially tap to get word of mouth going, and possibly some press exposure - but it's far, far too early to do that - I'm only likely to get one shot at that.

I can probably obtain 3-4 Mbps balanced through my local ISP - network setup and administration costs are then eliminated since I can equip a small network at home - though I'd rather rent a proper office or light industrial unit. Balancing the cost of office or unit rental (which round here is real expensive) and the same package against colocation solutions will be part of my costing process prior to release. The cheaper I can get a decent pipe (and back-end LAN) the longer I can afford to host for, which improves my chance of getting enough subscriptions in to cover costs and start making profit.

We didn't advertise too much (that is, paid advertising). Only 200 USD or so on mpogd.com
We did however submit our game to MMORPG websites, tops, Linux sites (such as Freshmeat.net), and so on.
If you are more interested about the whole history of Eternal Lands, you can find it here: http://www.devmaster.net/articles/mmorpg-postmortem/part1.php

Regarding the servers: I am looking to buy a new server, but they are very very expensive. For example, my laptop is an AMD 64 3000+, 1.2 GB RAM, and I got it for 900 USD.
A server like that (but bigger HDDs, in a RAID) is about twice as expensive, and even more expensive in France, where our host is. It will cost us more than 2K USD. Of course, most of the cost is actually for the tech support (3 years, they come the next day on site and fix the problem).

So what I am saying is that you'd be better off if you can host your server at home or at your office, because you are not required to just get a 'dedicated' server, but you can use a normal desktop or even a laptop.
Plus, you will need an office anyway, and you will also need a good Internet connection there.

I think you'll find the coverdiscs will increase takeup.

I have a contact in the magazine trade (no, not a newsagent) who might be able to assist with getting my games out (once my library and asset stuff is running nicely).

Also I plan to blitz the traditional roleplaying press and sites, since my games are designed along more traditional lines. It's a case of getting to your target market, I suppose.

The prices you quote don't seem too bad to me, but I'm in the UK and stuff is expensive here anyway. :-/

By mid January, we'll have teo magazines (one from Finnland one from UK) putting EL on their cover disk.
I'll let you know the estimated increase in the simultaneous players number due to those magazines.

How much is (after taxes and shipping) a server there? Say, an AMD32 3000+, 1 GB RAM, 2x160 GB HDDs?

With the 2 160 Gb drives, it should weigh in at around £600 off the shelf - add say £50 for shipping, around £650. Which is a shade under $1k if my arithmetic serves me.

_winterdyne_

Tell a lie. They've dropped since I got mine. :-(

Should be able to get a machine like that for around £400 including shipping. Cheap!

_winter_

Great thread.

_winterdyne_, I'm interested to know what you find in the way of hosting. I'll most likely set up my servers at home. What sort of packages are available in the UK for broad band connections - which do not have seriously limited upload?

Raduprv, congrats on getting on the coverdisks, i'll look out for it here. I'll bet you get a very big user increase.