Housing should just have paid wards (which in turn also enables people to buy any size). This money can be used to get more servers with it (sure, maintenance wise this might still add some costs at some point, but usualy at that point servers should be more efficient). This therefor should then be sustainable.

Free wards then still have the advantage that a player never paid for it. But this is more legacy (maybe you can even make houses in old wards cost money at that point), and you could always give the paid houses extra advantages (better farming).

This then also disrupts the RMT market massively. Because why would you buy a house from them if SE is already providing the option reliably?

Only those shell FCs that just lock out a large house then can have the advantage of having ward 1, and therefor being a bit more visible.

The only problem is that the hardware can be an issue to obtain. Which was the issue we had a while ago.

Islands would already provide the free method of housing anyway, so its not like they will be missing out on everything.