Running a server

[midnight]

I would love to pick everyones brain and start a discussion.
How many people here run large servers?
What have been the biggest challenges in doing so?
What is the average player count?
Any hosting you would recommend? (Or not recommend)
If you could do everything differently what would you do?
Would love to hear about everyone's experiences, trials, and roadblocks or what have you if anyone wants to share their experiences

 

[Voxpire]

How many people here run large servers?
What is the average player count?

Large is subjective to opinion, what do you consider large?
There are only a handful of shards that have more than 500 players, a decent share make it past 100, but the majority are 10-100 on average.
The largest shard currently is Outlands, which had 4,000~ players turn up for the holiday events and has an average of 2,000~ daily.

What have been the biggest challenges in doing so?

Player/community management; dealing with players directly can get toxic and burn you out fast.
You need a thick skin to deal with bug reports and complaints on a daily basis, otherwise you should hire someone to be the front of house.

Any hosting you would recommend? (Or not recommend)

A VDS from NFO is a good place to start, AWS is preferred by extremely active shards.

If you could do everything differently what would you do?

I have no regrets

 

[AdamD]

4000 players, wow, that's amazing.
Are they running ServUO?

 

[midnight]

I still play on demise and see a regular count of mid 300. A lot of those are alts though, and afk resource gatherers which seem to have gotten out of hand. I didn't feel the same atmosphere there as I did in the old days, which is another reason I ended up here