@elect_engineer:
Well, as many here already pointed out, I do not see here cancer grows. The 16,000,000,000 page views per month is something really huge.<p>For some perspective, I run servers for a commercial company, and with such traffic, we would pay about $7,000,000 per year. But of course, we run on the latest and overprovisioned hardware for best performance and safety, and in reputable, but a very expensive company. In this scenario, $2M for hosting such a big infrastructure globally is not looking too bad. I assume that they need a lot of sysadmins to manage such big infrastructure (maybe 500-600 servers?), and those needs to be paid well. I won't be surprised that this would be much over $10M per year. Maybe this data is available somewhere, those are only my pure estimates.<p>Anyway, with revenue of $100M and $20M of excess every year, dramatic mails and notices I get from MediaWiki and Wales itself, how bad Wikipedia needs my donation, looks now a little disgusting for me...