With a CVCS, the server holding the central repository needs to be powerful enough to serve the needs of the entire team. For a team of 10 people, this is not an issue. For larger teams, the hardware limitations of the server can be a performance bottleneck.

Some systems (such as IBM Rational ClearCase or Microsoft Team Foundation Server) expect the server to do a lot of work. It can be challenging and expensive to set up a server to support thousands of users.

Generally speaking, a DVCS has much more modest hardware requirements for a central server. Users don’t interact with the server unless they need to push or pull. All the heavy lifting happens on the client side so the server hardware can be very simple indeed.

With a DVCS, it is also possible to scale the central server by turning it into a server farm. Instead of one large server machine, you can add capacity by adding more small server machines, using scripts to keep them all in sync with each other.