To be fair to LL, when you "buy" virtual land you are buying more than just space on a server. You are also getting some portion of the asset server cluster (a not insignificant investment -- I think they're up to petabytes of asset data by now) and the login servers, supporting a fraction of the overhead for the public lands like the Help Islands, the Infohubs, and the Linden offices, supporting web services such as the forums (but presumably not the currency exchange, which should be at least self-supporting from its fees), and paying a fraction of the salaries of the in-world team and the software developers. Those are all expenses that a normal hosting company doesn't have. And you're paying for server space that probably uses more bandwidth than a typical web server does.

I would like to see more transparency on LL's part about costs, especially after the recent price increase on Openspaces. People feel, and rightly so given the lack of information, that it's a case of LL gouging them rather than taking a necessary action to recover costs. It's normal behavior for a business to disclose as little of that information as possible, but I would like to think that a company that takes its Tao seriously might do business differently. (The original version of the Tao included transparency as one of their values, but the recently rewritten version changes the wording so that it only applies to internal transparency rather than being open to the world. Once again, the lawyers and the suits have their way.)