[unoti]

There's very little persistent storage involved with what MMO's and many other kinds of game servers do. Unlike web apps and many business apps, they are definitely not data bound.

I am aware that much of Eve Onlike is written in Python. But they are very premium: $15/mo. Would they be able to support their infrastructure for say $3 from 1 out of every 10 users once every 3 months?

I'm also aware that Facebook was originally written in PHP. Their business model is different, but they are also world leaders in PHP performance and compiling. There's a reason they invested so much in the performance.