A thing about prices for servers

[frederik...@gmail.com]

A lot of people have said a lot about price when it comes to setting
up a new server and training the admin for that server. Most of those
calculations are bullshit at best.

Here is how I would do it (no, I'm not doing it, I'm just telling you
how you should do it right).
1) Find out what kind of hardware you want and figure out the price of
that hardware. If one OS runs equivelant on cheaper hardware to
another OS, that's saved money.
2) Find out what it will cost to get a legal copy of the OS + all
relevant applications and system libraries installed on the hardware
of choise.
3) Find out what the kind of backup hardware you need and get that.

Administration costs tend to be the most biased part of this
calculation, but in fact it isn't even part of it. It is to be
expected that the cost of having someone hired to take care of a
server is the same, regardless of what operating system that server is
running. Linux admins are not more expensive than Windows admins. It
is also expected that the cost of training an admin is the same --
shopping around will get you better results, and even if you can find
someone who will trainin an admin for one OS at a lower price than you
can find to train the same admin for another OS, nothing is stopping
that from being very different tomorrow or even if you looked around a
bit more. Most of the advantage that people claim for Windows with
this respect is "there are already a lot of people trained for
Windows" or similar. The fact is however, that this is easily changed
-- simply by training people for other OS', and it's also true for
Unix like operating systems. Personally, I know no-one who is a
trained Windows admin, despite the fact that I know a lot of Windows
admins, but I do know a lot of people who are trained Unix admins,
despite the fact that I know very few Unix admins.

My way of calculating the price to run an OS will tend to make the
more effective and stable OS be the winner for several reasons. 1) It
tends to require less hardware and 2) it tends to require less backup
systems. Furthermore it also tends to drive the electrical bill down a
bit (as you don't need as many processors to do the same -- or you
could do with less MHz per processor).

[ChanKaiShi]

You are forgetting cost of support of your open source software. Once
you factor those things in, the cost of OS for Windows with 2 support
incidents included and $1000 a year for support for Redhat probably
will end up costing you the same. Price for admins is correct,
probably will be the same for UNIX or Windows.
If you are in any kind of serious business where downtime is not
acceptable you'd want support, be it for Windows, Linux, mySQL or MS
SQL.

[zbych]

If you wish to have a server in some hosting company an dyou hire a
server this will quite often come with a server software included in
price.
We actually use theplanet.com where system with windows costs the same
as system with linux. Other providers charge extra fee for Windows
license, but it is in the range of $40 per month at most. This is
nothing comparing with cost of running business website.
In your calculation you have not included the time taken by everyday
operations, not only the cost of pure server maintenance, but for
example the cost of deployment.
We have chosen ASP.NET platform not because we are Microsoft lovers,
but because it seemes to be the most efficient. Writing, testing and
deploying code is easier and faster than JSP. C# is richer language
than Java, so even if we were paying this extra $40 for Windows per
month, if one of developers would save 1 hour in the month (thanks to
available development tools), it pays to have Windows server.

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