Why not just add instanced housing?

[Dyvid]

TL;DR They should let us buy islands from abalathia's spine and tow it to the housing areas an let us build there isolated (instanced separatedly) from the wards.

Because that was already answered on the first page: "Finally, I’ve seen a few posts on the forums saying housing would be better if it was instanced like inn rooms are, so I want to point out that instances aren't saved. Nothing in an inn room needs to be saved; player housing, on the other hand, necessitates personal save data for things like furniture placement and character location. So, it would really amount to adding more land anyway. - Yoshi-P"

The wards are nothing but a hub. I'm no programmer but when you talk about saving data like furniture placement and so on you can either do it server side or user side. FFXIV has to save almost everything on the server side because of PS3/PS4 users and their limited hard drive space. That takes up a lot of resources.

Yes FFXI also had instance housing but it was very limited by only being able to place certain items at certain spots. Also it was only much much later that other players could enter your houses. FFXIV housing grants much more freedom but that freedom comes at a cost.

[Niwashi]

Because that was already answered on the first page: "Finally, I’ve seen a few posts on the forums saying housing would be better if it was instanced like inn rooms are, so I want to point out that instances aren't saved. Nothing in an inn room needs to be saved; player housing, on the other hand, necessitates personal save data for things like furniture placement and character location. So, it would really amount to adding more land anyway. - Yoshi-P"

It already saves housing data from the current wards. They're usually kept online 24/7, but they're shut down, saved to a database, and then reloaded from that data when needed. (Currently that only happens during server maintenance, but that it can ever happen means that SE has already coded for it and set up that database.) With individual instancing, that same pattern simply happens more often, saving processing on the servers by making them keep only currently used houses loaded rather than all of them. At any given time, only a small percentage of houses are actively being used, so instancing them saves the server from having to keep handling all the rest of them. The rest are just a negligible few bytes in a database until someone enters them again.