You have provided the answer to the question yourself. The number of Word Press websites that can actually run on a server with 256GB RAM and 16 cores is incalculable. The suitability of a server for a particular website depends on various factors. Would you be surprised if you are told that sometimes you can only host one website? Sometimes these hardware capabilities will not be enough for you to host even one website with very high traffic. Sometimes you will be able to host thousands of WP websites. Therefore, discussing such a question will not be very practical.
Thanks for your post. I was thinking along the line of average wordpress sites.
If I already had thousands of wordpress sites I would know how many cores, RAM, storage and traffic on average the sites need. Sure, some will have lots of traffic and some will have none. Unfortunately I don’t have any info so I just don’t know.
But that’s what I’m looking for – a ballpark number. You know, is it maybe 10, 100, 200, 500, 1000, 2000 sites?