I factored that into my TCO. The actual cost for a decent server nowadays is about $4000. The other $6000 is the money spent on that server over 2 years. I'm assuming a sysadmin at $100k/year maintaining 50 servers, so that adds $4000. The other $2000 is power, rackspace, and other incidentals. That comes out to, roughly, $85/month which is rather high. I'm also assuming all free software (Linux, Apache, Pg/MySQL, etc).
Does that work out better?
My criteria for good software:
- Does it work?
- Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?