Naw, people don't give sphere enough credit.
I hosted a 55i shard for just friends while goofing off with up to 10 people on it at a time on a 166mhz with 32mb ram and a 28.8k dialup and Win98.
I hosted a 55i shard also on a 500mhz and 256mb ram (originally 128mb ram, it genuinely got laggy though what with windows using half that on boot up hehe) and an average cable connection. We'd do 30-35 people with that and the very moderate lag came from my connection.
Friend ran a 48e PVP shard on the T1 connection I was gonna use for Tragena (until the host got tired of waiting on me *sniffle*). It was a 1ghz machine with 256mb ram running win2k.... he had just over 200 players on at once for awhile there, always more than 150 on.
Servers use twice the upload they do download... so having broadband doesn't necessarily mean great connection. DSL typically has a very small upstream and a huge downstream.... cable typically has a slightly better upstream and similar downstream. My cable for example is 386kbps up and 3mbps down. I can *download* at speeds like 500KB/s but i can only send at 45KB/s or so. If you figure 2KB/s per player (this is an average I pulled out of my ass, it'll go up and down) I can barely hold 20 players comfortably. So while they're all correct in saying connection is #1, I wanted to narrow that down some and say upstream bandwidth is #1
