Quote Originally Posted by Subliminal View Post
Servers aren't expensive to run, just to be clear. I'm not sure what sort of mythical thing people may think servers are, but I have a rack of them in my garage that add maybe $25 to my electric bill each month. Total. They are happy to sit and chug and churn and serve without an army of people fussing over them. Yes, we do upgrades. Yes, we do backups. Yes, on occasion we even go out there and clear off the dust bunnies that invade. If anyone would like to pay me a month's worth of what people likely spend on one server for Tynon for these tasks, please let me know. I would be happy to do nice things with this money.

(And yes, there are designers (art and code) and tech support (well, a canned list of tech support messages and probably one poor guy who does gem refunds) so I am aware that bottom line, it does cost more than an electric bill to run Tynon.)
Servers are cheap to run, however licensing for certain things can be expensive, especially if they're annual/monthly costs. Internet bandwidth can also get quite expensive for companies. If you need server-grade SSD drives or RAIDs, depending on your setup that can run a pretty penny too. There are other factors, but it really boils down to: Licensing, storage, and bandwidth are expensive. Software that allows you to scale out with more machines is cheap.

Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if Tynon's setup consists of about a hundred VMs (one for each "server" to maintain game state) with a load-balanced internal data access cluster of VMs that can run calculations the actual server doesn't require (such as battles), as well as saving/retrieving required data from their database.

Essentially, I'm guessing optimally there is a 4-tier architecture in place. Game UI, Game Server, Calculation/Data Retrieval Service, Data Storage (be it database or disk). Managing something like that is more complex than you'd believe if you haven't dealt with something that complex before.