Would this game best be served with a single sever?

Apart from server re-design issues involved in creating a single shard world, imagine for a second a few thousand people in Imperial Fleet. Isn't gonna happen on any modern piece of hardware :-)

It would take some radical re-design of the surroundings of high population areas, or something like a random distribution of people in the zone among several Imperial Fleet instances.

Probably.

but "omg teh community"

good suggestion sadly Bioware will not do it instead the postpone such choices to a later point.
And tell in dev blog or other forum posts what they will do.
And more people will leave because not of swtor itself but of Bioware and how they handle things.
Because it takes them so long to decide something by the time it is realized its to late

I played both CO and STO, both of which used a single server design. In those cases it did work, but they had a couple things in place from the start that were needed for it to work.

First was no open world PvP other then in given areas or instances. Other then that there was no open PvP, even in STO which did have two factions.

Second was the global name. That allowed them to get away with the unique name issue, because your name was actually <name>@<gname> So you could have more then one SolarStorm running around, because the character name was only part of the name.

So if there were to do something like that here, they'd have to do some sort of global name and not restrict names in any way. Without that it would be pretty much impossible for people to have a name they actually want.

Doing a single server isn't actually that big of a deal in terms of tech, it's not like it's actually one physical server, it's many, many servers each connected with instances that spawn depending on the number of people.

The idea that Bioware couldn't do it, is quite simply silly... They could of done it, but decided not to. I know enough about server architecture too know that what CO and STO did isn't that much much different then the existing server structure. They already have the system set up to create shards dynamically based on population.

There were lots of "I don't want to see a lot of people around" comments, but I'll just pick yours to quote. I covered that in my suggested idea. They have the instancing in place. When you come to a new planet, you are dropped in whatever instance they want to put you in. If there are too many people there, you can join a lower pop instance. If the 'lowest' pop instance has at least 30 people in it, you can spin up a new one! Now, I have played a lot on planets where there are 30 people, and I see maybe 5 of them, if it's a planet where there are 50 dailies. So that would seem to cover it pretty well.

You'd need to have the ability to either be only in your instance general, or in a global general, or both (same with all the other channels, trade, lfg, whatever). So there would have to a be a huge server (now, we know when we say 'server' we are talking about a virtual thing that is made up of lots of pieces of hardware, yada yada, we're all on the same page...clearly when we say 'everyone is on the same server', we're not saying it's some old Dell Mom doesn't use any more, right? Good) to handle that.

I would imagine you could even have some instancing preferences you could set in options.

Size of instance I'd 'like' to join when I visit:
A planet: high, med, low
The fleet: high, med, low

Chat channel preferences (for each type):
universe
fleet
planet
instance

All sorts of ways you could cut that up.

As far as community, this is a 'bit' tougher, but some things to note:

Most folks these days think of their guild as their community. If you read a lot of 'why is chat so quiet' posts, lamenting over the good ol' days whenever everyone chatted in general, the responses are usually 3 things:
a. I play with a few friends and we hook up on headset chat.
b. My guild is my community, I only chat in guild chat, and sometimes use their chat server to talk.
c. I shut off general because "Mankirk's Wife" killed general for me.

Odd for me, this is a sore spot. I'm usually guildless. The idea of chatting on a guild Ventrillo, TS (forget the name of the new one...starts with an M?) doesn't appeal to me. I guess I'm kinda a jerk socially. But I do friend people, a lot. People I play with. That kinda becomes my community. I'll friend someone, make a note about them. If they are online and I happen to see them, I'll throw a wave at them. So how do we 'see' those friends, at least, in a sea of people?

I vote for some sort of indicator, or a message or sound, like when a friend comes online, that pops when a friend is nearby. A little 'help' that you noticed them walking down the street. What you do with that is up to you. Even an option setting to set a color for the names of friends.

An additional thing that might help with community is Alliances.

Allow guilds to have alliances. Allow people to join an alliance without being in a guild. Allow people to put percentage discounts on things sold in the GTN for alliance members. Add alliance benefits (like legacy). Tie Alliances into PvP! AvAvAvAv...nv! Again, an option to set the color for names of people in your alliance. There would have to be a hierarchy of which color you see, and 'that' hierarchy, again, can be configurable by player. Maybe you want to see your friend colors over guild?

Lots of fun options there I think to solve these things...but I do feel it's the next big mechanic.

Well whena server is full in swtor how many is on ?
Guessing 2000-3000 maybe.Think the issue , well we all know what the issue is.
There should be less servers with atleast 3 times as many people on them. We know
the game engine cant handle more then 100-200 people before the game crash but thats why
they could instance the sosial fail fleet etc like they did launch.But a singel server no !

Bioware would need to do a very very significant recoding of their implementation..... so for all practical purpose IT IS IMPOSSIBLE for a released game. Even the famous EVE Online cannot handle the regional populations this game has (well, except for maybe Asia Pac at the moment). Besides, EVE plays a shell game as it is not one server per se, it's a large game lobby with each planetary system (or cluster of systems) being it's own physical server.

The testing I have done indicates that at curren server settings, they go FULL at ~2500 and queues actually begin at ~3000. There is actually a buffer between FULL and Queue as best I can tell.

It already is. It's called The Fatman.

Your ideas are interesting, but server technology really does not support it at this point unless you really put in some interesting smoke and mirrors (like EVE has done). Even in EVEs case, they saturate well below SWTOR regional population levels.

As VPS technology matures in the coming years, large server arrays can be configured and then virtually partitioned into intances as needed to support what looks like a single server (ie: a galaxy). But in today's technology, it is not the most cost effective option for MMOs to use. Maybe in 5 years or so, when VPS has matured and there exists mature monitor layers and application layers to do this for something other then internet hosting, data streaming, or CAD/CAE (which is where most VPS is designed to operate.