Um ok thats one solution, which i will refer to as the windows solution, sense thats how most freesoftware is offered on windows Well us linux users are a bunch of hippies that like to help eachother out and not pay for things, so heres my stab at it.

So here is my linux style solution

How this works, is each zone is dependent on someone donation a server to hold 100 or so people. Now to make someone actually want to donate a server, there will be a mapmaker which can place monsters from the planeshift database. Therefore each server makes there own zone. Each server would have to check the server database to make sure the next server is up. All character files will be stored on one server, and read and written when needed. I believe this would result in a huge world, which would be less laggy cause characters would be spread out