Yeah, this would be my main concern with switching from vent. The hosting. Right now I run off of game daemons, and while it is expensive, it is pretty reliable.

Even a technologically superior service could be brought to its knees by bad hosting.

Not to mention that almost the entirety of the WoW population uses Vent. I used to pug into a guild run every few weeks that had to switch from their Mumble server to their Vent server for the six or seven puggers they were bringing in.

There is a bunch of commercial Mumble hosting options under 0.2$ per slot per month. That is 10$ per month for a 50 slot server. Sounds pretty good to me.

@Cyanea:

I don't think you read the article. Rich admitted that the only problem with Mumble is getting people to adopt it, especially if you run pugs often.

That said, if people want to raid, they'll have to run what you run. Requiring things like DBM, Omen, Healbot, and even Ventrilo has become standard practice - you don't use our tools, you don't run our raids. This is simply swapping out a worse option (Ventrilo) for a better one (Mumble).