Tried to do some quick maths on if there would be any cost savings for hosting on one of the big cloud providers but, and I'm a little shocked by this, it wasn't even close. Granted I think that if you did host this on VMs you would be able to manage concurrent user activity a little better and possibly be able to reduce the server count, but even in Azure's cloud, large Windows instances are costly (Depending on size I was seeing roughly $4/hr which comes to about $2500/mo per instance!).
Curious if y'all have any interest in adopting cloud technologies for hosting the game. If so I'd love to have a discussion with your infra team just to see if it would be worth it. It terms of management I think thing would get a lot easier but testing would definitely be required and since I'm not familiar with the game's architecture I don't know how much you could potentially scale down to meet the same demand.
DM me on here or in Discord (@Sacalicious#0501) if you have questions about adopting a cloud based solution. :)
