CCP Games title EVE Online is run on one of the biggest clustered super computers on the planet, with five thousand star systems and one or two million unique objects in play at any one time. Their server system is so powerful that they schedule a 60 minutes down time every day to run backups, and the system can deal with up to 25,000 players ( and occasionally more ) without collapsing.

Thanks to the large size of the database that players engage with, EVE Online doesnt lend itself to private server play, and there aren't any EVE Online private servers.

In large part, the absence of EVE Online private servers is a good for the final play of the game. Lots of the appeal of playing EVE Online is the actual number of players working at the same time on the universe. Because EVE Online runs on a single cluster, there's never a choice, like in World of Warcraft, or town of Heroes, to choose which server you're going to be on based mostly on the server your pals are on. You are either on the peace server ( if you use English interface ) or the Serenity server ( if you are using the Chinese language interface ), and there are usually ten thousand or even more players on concurrently to interact with. There is a 3rd server run by CCP, the test server, called Singularity, and they recommend that everybody set up an account there to test things and supply input into the next development of the game.

Against this for Worlds of Warcraft, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of private servers out there, that will let anywhere from 100 to perhaps one thousand players log in concurrently. For WoW, this is a chance to "grind in private" ; if you tried doing that on EVE Online, you'd have a tricky time hooking up with other players at all, due to the massive size of the database to explore.

In a genuine sense, private servers for MMOs are a threatening thing for the companies that produce the games. Those games are costly to draft, dear to maintain, require paid staff to keep on top of things, and require a continuing development budget and promoting plan. The subscription model you pay is what keeps the game being developed ; setting up "hacked" MMO private servers simply hastens the day when the company publishing the MMO can't sustain the operation any longer, and has to shut things down.

Luckily for CCP, an EVE Online private server is a really hard thing to line up for a home user ; the majority do not have home-based bunches of high end computers, each with sixteen gigs of RAM, to try to cause it to happen.