hmmm how much does it cost for one to run their own server
Believe it or not but the "server" itself is likely to be the cheapest part. Figure about $20k for a single blade server with enough horses to run a single world. You do what to have more than about 4 or 5 players at the same time, right? We'll need a few of those. Figure 8 to support 4 worlds with failover support. Figure 5 times that for the chassis to hold the blade servers. Storage for that race horse is another quarter of a mil. Since blade servers generally don't have much storage on the blade, we'll 10Gig Ethernet between storage and the chassis. Can't price that one but Cisco Nexus 5ks ain't cheap. The technical support to take care of it and protect it from hackers is another $100k per year. We'll need a minimum of 5 people for that. If you went open source for the OS with something like OpenStack to carve up those blades into multiple servers with full isolation you'd save a a lot of money on virtualization. We'll need database servers to store toons that aren't in the world, the various objects, rooms, maps, etc. Commercial SQL servers hurt license wise. Can't price those. Haven't in a few years. Likely a pair of Kerberos servers for login accounts too. And that doesn't count the various business servers you'll need to support the business you'll have to have to get the kind of cash such a beast requires.
Then there's the data circuit. Figure another $10k+ / month. We gamers eat bandwidth. Streaming video might beat us out, but I doubt it.
And I haven't even brought up the space to setup that beast or the HVAC to keep it comfortable. Or their costs.
Before you guys and gals shoot me for the post, keep in mind I manage a team that takes care of a few VMware ESX vCenter/vCloud Director 5.1 clouds. 3 clouds actually with a total of 450 blade servers.
Why so expensive? Consumer grade hardware lasts about a month under such heavy use. It isn't designed to take on such a challenge.
But. If we are serious about making our home live again, we'll find a way. You know, forming our own little LLC that's player owned would give us the necessary clout to get such a beast up and running.