Why only 8 regions auctioned per day?

I notice that for the last few days (2/16, 2/15, 2/14, 2/13 2/11), only 8 region sized (65,536 sm nominal) lots were auctioned per day.

This seems somewhat odd, are they limiting how many can be sold on a daily basis??

It was 4 per day for the longest while the last couple months. They upped it to 8/day to try and ease prices but apparently that hasn't materialized granted how many new people are coming into SL.

Now that I just up and bought land instead of fighting for first land... why on earth don't they up the amount of land available to keep abreast with the new premium accounts? I mean it's one thing to have it lower than the actual premium accounts available, but this low when people can wait for weeks to month to try to get land?

According to the Blog they are increasing the grid size by 30% in the next few weeks. However, I do not think it will make an appreciable difference; Along with a surge (ouch, that word) in memberships, and mounting interest by big business to establish a presence in SL (IBM apparently has 24 Islands, as an example) I feel land will continue to play at a premium.

For every 4 new regions that get placed on the grid, 1 new duel duel core server needs to be installed, networked, programmed, terraformed, and tested. That is a lot of work. They added almost 200 server is just PI's alone last month. So, that is why they are only doing 8 regions a day.

I think.....

LL actually creates around 25 islands a day; 779 in January. The fact that only 8 get put up for auction daily could be seen as a means of keeping the prices high . . .

Think of this:

Rounded up to 800 per month, at $1700 per unit, equals income of around $1,300,000 and add in the $300 tier, that gives you $240,000 for a total of say $1,500,000 per month.

Now, at the end of January there were around 3,900 islands @ a minimum of $200 a month in tier payments, generating at least $780,000, added to the $1.5M, and you have approximately $2.3M.

Now, a typcal server can host two islands, and costs around $1,000, or less, it does not need a fancy video card, just a good sized fast disk subsystem, 2-4GB DRam, and a pair of Gigabyte Ethernet ports. Dual Core CPUs are not that expensive, and in all honesty, Internet servers do not stress their CPUs.