SE Dont be afraid of the cloud ...

[Arzalis]

If you want an example of a game that runs well on the cloud, look at GW2. Regardless of how you feel about the gameplay or whatever, their infrastructure is insanely good. The game doesn't even have downtime for major patches, they just phase out old outdated instances slowly when people zone or logoff.

I'm sure the FFXIV devs do the best with what they have. That said, it's easy to look at things like housing and conclude they would benefit from at least a hybrid approach to their infrastructure. Granted, there's almost definitely a lot of work to implement that sort of thing.