With the recent launch of EA/Mythic‘s Warhammer Online MMORPG, comes my usual curiosity about who’s providing the infrastructure.

Mythic has stated publicly that all of the US game servers are located in Virginia, near Mythic’s offices. A couple of traceroutes seem to indicate that they’re in Verizon, almost certainly in colocation (managed hosting is rare for MMOGs), and seem to have purely Verizon connectivity to the Internet. The webservers, on the other hand, look to be split between Verizon, and ThePlanet in Dallas. FileBurst (a single-location download hosting service) is used to serve images and cinematics.

During the beta, Mythic used BitTorrent to serve files. With the advent of full release, it doesn’t appear that they’re depending on peer-to-peer any longer — unlike Blizzard, for instance, which uses public P2P in the form of BitTorrent for its World of Warcraft updates, trading off cost with much higher levels of user frustration. MMO updates are probably an ideal case for P2P file distribution — Solid State Networks, a P2P CDN, has done well by that — and with hybrid CDNs (those combining a traditional distributed model with P2P) becoming more commonplace, I’d expect to see that model more often.

However, I’m not keen on either single data center locations or single-homing, for anything that wants to be reliable. I also believe that gaming — a performance-sensitive application — really ought to run in a multi-homed environment. My favorite “why you should use multiple ISPs, even if you’re using a premium ISP that you love” anecdote to my clients is an observation I made while playing World of Warcraft a few years ago. WoW originally used just AT&T’s network (in AT&T colocation). Latency was excellent — most of the time. Occasionally, you’d get a couple of seconds of network burp, where latency would spike hugely. If you’re websurfing, this doesn’t really impact your experience. If you’re playing an online game, you can end up dead. When WoW switched to Internap for the network piece (remaining in AT&T colo), overall latencies went up — but the latencies were still well below the threshold of problematic performance, and more importantly, the latencies were rock-solidly in a narrow window of variability. (This is the same reason multi-homed CDNs with lots of route diversity deliver better consistency of user experience than single-carrier CDNs.)

Companies like Fileburst, by the way, are going to be squarely in the crosshairs of the forthcoming Amazon CDN. Fileburst will do 5 TB of delivery at $0.80 per GB — $3,985/month. At the low end, they’ll do 100 GB or less at $1/GB. The first 100 MB of storage is free, then it’s $2/MB. They’ve got a delivery infrastructure at the Equinix IBX in Ashburn (Northern Virginia, near DC), extensive peering, but any other footprint is vague (they say they have a six-location CDN service, but it’s not clear whether it’s theirs or if they’re reselling).

If Amazon’s CDN pricing is anything like the S3 pricing, they’ll blow the doors off those prices. S3 is $0.15/GB for space and $0.17/GB for the first 10 TB of data transfer. So deliver 5 TB worth of content, out of a 1 GB store, would cost me $5,785/month with Fileburst, and about $850 with Amazon S3. Even if the CDN premium on data transfer is, say, 100%, that’d still be only $1,700 with Amazon.

Amazon has a key cloud trait — elasticity, basically defined as the ability to scale to zero (or near-zero) as easily as scaling to bogglosity. It’s that bottom end that’s really going to give them the potential to wipe out the zillion little CDNs that primarily have low-volume customers.