Just been reading this morning.
Hmmmm, I don't know who to believe. Got discord channels saying the costs are ridiculously over-inflated, that Homecoming is not releasing code to aid others and are trying to control all, which I can kind of see happening.
On the other hand, this 4chan (who I'd never heard of until i joined discord) sound a bit dodgy, and offering up full un-moderated servers etc is not something I'd fancy jumping over to.
Seems to be too many factions and drama. I just want to play the game
Been a lot of fallout between the original Score people, Reddit, 4Chan and another group that I'm not sure the background of - there was a big division around 3 days in after an attempt to work together (LOL). Whole thing is a bit childish really
I don't see the costs as being that outlandish - for a high player count you are fighting with an antiquated architecture that takes some brute forcing hardware wise to overcome and while they've made some changes so as to be able to suspend inactive map nodes it can only go so far and for best performance you need a lot of map servers fully spun up and they take a lot of RAM (a moderately active instance will eat 20+GB of RAM).
The hosting costs aren't the cheapest but a lot of the cheaper server hosts are more suited to bulk web site hosting than game servers and a little extra money can make a huge difference to game hosting performance.
EDIT: Just seen the screenshots for Homecoming - for ~1700 players they are using near 200GB of RAM in total over 5 map servers (actually more than that but the screenshot doesn't show the rest - there are 15 launchers in total).