Late to the party, but I’m mostly playing on Warmane’s servers. Currently switching between Icecrown for the population and quicker levelling, and Icecrown which is much harder and slower with 1x rates.

I started on WoW Hardcore for the permadeath, and Kronos for the full Vanilla experience, but they’re much less populated so they don’t “feel” as much like MMOs, but rather RPGs where you can talk to and join others if you organise to meet up… which is fine of course, and I enjoy them, but I’m preferring the MMO experience right now.

I haven’t played on Whitemane yet, as I’m currently after an experience closer to the original Vanilla -> TBC -> WotLK progression, but Whitemane does look pretty good as a Cataclysm+ prog server. It doesn’t look Blizzlike, which could be a pro or con depending on your personal preference, but it does look like it has a decent population. Quick clarification though; the highest XP rate is 3x, not 4.5x.

Might check this out sometime over the next few months, as I can’t seem to find any other Cataclysm servers with population higher than like 200 lol.