My internet connection is something like 50$ a month. I was getting 5MB down and 512k up and I found out it was only 5$ more a month to upgrade to 10MB down 1MB up! So, of course I couldn't pass that up!
I use Charter. But there are many alternatives in my area now for really nice speeds. There is Charter Cable, Multiple DSL companies, and even AT&T offering fiber, and all of them offer speeds about the same as my internet now. I would imagine there should be more choices in your areas as well unless you are in a remote location. Don't forget that you are looking for high UPLOAD speeds. Your download rate doesn't matter. Your server will use maybe 1/5 the download that it uses compared to how much upload it uses.
One thing to help tweak the server is to make sure you are loading many dynamic zones (I run 50 now). And make sure to set a wide range of ports on your router to have at least double as many ports as you have dynamic zones. So if you have 50 dynamic zones, you might set port ranges in the router to 7000 - 7100, but you could even set it to 7000 - 7500. You can also try my zone resetter quest which will clear player ghosts out of your zones, and that makes your server stable for a longer amount of time. You can find it in the Custom Quests section of the forums here.
There are many other things that can cause you to waste the bandwidth you do have. One of the problems to look out for is large zones with a ton of spawns. Especially if you are using a zone as your "server base" like Nexus or PoK, try to make sure they only have the characters that your server needs. Well, that is if you are making a custom server. This is because popular zones mean alot of players and the server sends out updates to all players in each zone normally 1 time per minute on seperate times for each zone. So, if you have 500 mobs in a zone and there are 20 players in it, it has to send location and other information out 500X20. This will cause spikes in CPU usage that you can see on your server if you open windows task manager pretty clearly.
I recommend trying to use smaller zones for customizing and very small zones for your server base like Nexus or Guildhall or something. That way, you can have 20 or 30 NPCs in the zone and not have it seem empty. And if you have any extra mobs in a zone you are customizing, removing them does help. I know when I redid PoValor, it somehow had all of the NPCs from PoTranquility floating out in the middle of nowhere. So, I just removed them all.
For server hardware, RAM is the most important thing. The more RAM you have, the more stable your zones will be. The only other thing to worry about is CPU. But, I have heard that a nice NIC and Router don't hurt either.
That's all I can think of for now.
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