| MikeB said: @ JaggedSac Actually, M$ stores a ton of data for each GamerTag. All previous purchases, achievement info, friends lists, etc. You do realize this "tons of data" weighs in at only a few kilobytes, Sony stores such information as well, but most likely one customized Playstation Home or even a Home avatar will take much more storage space for Sony. |
There are quite a few more things that they store as well, such as voice, video, and text messages, but I didn't feel the need to extrapolate. The more data that a company stores, the more it costs. I work for a company that stores a minimal amount of important data about our customers in 2 data centers. The amount of money spent on the data centers(electricity, monitoring, maintenance, etc.) seems exorbitant when shown the amount of data being housed. Then again we do have an international organization that provides content for 127 countries in 25 languages. Since we wanted a fail safe and reliable service, all data is duplicated between the two centers, so that if one goes down, all traffic is routed to the other(this also helps with deploying our Enterprise Releases). If we were a really big site, that had much more traffic, we would need even more. We also pay for CDNs for faster retrieval of static content, I am sure they cache often. We also house a ton of servers in the data centers. Each "web application" that we develop runs in several instances on several servers so as to allow for appropriate load balancing. The more servers that we accrue, the more people we have to pay for monitoring. I am sure all of these things apply to Live, PSN, Steam, etc, and on a MUCH larger scale.
