Interesting post from WoW general forum.

[Lissa]

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.
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Wrong, outsourcing servers and services does make sense in a business standpoint if it would cost you more to host the server and services yourself. What Blizzard is involved in is what is known as an ASP, Application Service Provider. (I happen to work at one of the largest Community Healthcare Clinics in the nation for disadvantaged peoples and we host a Medical database for not only ourselves, but several other Community Healthcare Clinics in Arizona and if my Boss has any say, possibly expanding to included other CHCs from New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and California.) The reasons to go with an ASP is that the cost of operating the servers and program would be more costly than to lease the services from someone else. (We spent $250k initially to buy the servers, software, and connectivity for our own remote sites along with out main clinic, and this is for about 500 connected users at one time, if you figure that a MMORPG has 10 times that, the cost could easily climb to several million dollars, and we have spend more money purchasing more servers and connection to adequately host other CHCs in Arizona, we have probably spent an additional $100k to do so, meaning out datacenter is probably on the order of $350k possibly as high as $400k for 500 users connect at one time.) So the reason Blizzard is outsourcing becomes readily apparent when you look at the potential costs that they may have to outlay between hardware (one time capital cost) and continued costs of manpower and maintainence.