Virtual Traffic Jam

Second Life generates 7GB-8GB of traffic per second, and is currently supported by 8,000 servers. "When people see the broader architecture, they'll understand that's... it's Web-like. It's scalable," said Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2007.

I did run a hosting sideshow at one time in my life (am still running a webserver with the full-monty somewhere) and discspace isn't the issue, hosting prices are basically determined by datatraffic nowadays. A regular European ISP will charge you about 1 euro per GB of datatraffic. So 8 euro's per second, 1,680 per minute, 100K per hour and 1.2 Million dollar per day.... I think they're getting quantum discount ;)

Right now, just at the end of the maintenance window, the Traffic Jam is actually happening. There's a new client version (1.5) that's been massively downloaded. The Second Life site is virtually dead right now.

Virtual Fortunes

As Lordly already posted, businessweek is doing an SL special, here's the interesting part:

"Meet the virtual world moguls. The number of Second Life residents generating more than $5,000 in monthly income has more than quadrupled to 116 in the past year."

The millionares:

1. Phillip Rosendale (the guy who did SL)
2. Ailin Graef(Anshe Chung real estate)
3. Reuben Steiger (Millions of Us)
4. Sibley Verbeck (Electric Sheep)
5. Alyssa LaRoche (Aimee Weber)
6. Adam Frisby (real estate)
7. Kevin Alderman (Strokerz Toys & Amsterdam Sim)
8. Peter Lokke (clothing)
9. Christiano Diaz (snapzilla SL)
10. Adam Anders (whatever, over 100.000 sales a day)

To wrap it up: No 1 is the one who dunnit, 2 real estate owners, 3 big builders, 2 clothing &kinky toys and 1 sidekick. So if you're not good at actually doing something, you can always invest in real estate.