Since you got 700+ players online and ofc some donations... Here is a perfect hardwaresetup:
Xeon E5 Hexacore
4x SAS or SSD (good ones, like Datacenter-Editions, 240GB or better 480GB) in RAID 10 (performance AND security)
64GB ECC RAM
Softwaresetup:
Win Server 2012 Standart
SQL Server Standart (not Expressshit @ 700+ players, you´ll come in troubles with your DB if it runs above 10GB+ size -> your shards ping will explode
)
aditionally 2 VMs via Hyper-V (Main machine SQL only, the VMs game-only)
You should run your game with 2 Gameservers
If you are greedy and won´t spend dat money, run your server atleast on 2 GS and clean your logs in short periodes -> if not -> remember what i´ve wrote about SQL-Server above)
