Re: [cobalt-users] [Qube 2] Restore CD

[Kris Dahl <krislists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> What Costs?
> I can Understand Colocation at someisp
> A Charge for bandwidth.
> maybe paying for a fsck?  oh ya gotta run....
>
> What other costs are there?

Those costs are your reoccurring network costs.  I am talking about the
costs of actually running the machine.

Costs include:
Downtime is obviously one of the biggest expenses.  If you are down you are
losing money. How much depends on the priority your business places on the
web site and information services.  It can add up pretty quickly, especially
if you don't have a contingency plan.  One way to reduce the cost is to have
a source of replacement hardware and a systems engineer handy.  So say that
your server goes down (and it probably will at some point), and it costs you
losses of revenue equal to $1000/per hour.  If you bring in a $100/hr
engineer and he gets you up and running in 2 hours, you have lost $2200.  If
you are down and don't have an SE handy, and it takes you 6 hours (or hell,
24), to get a response from Cobalt Standard support + 2 hours of your actual
labor, you lost $6200. $5000 difference--the 'free' route sure is expensive.

Further, downtime can severely damage your reputation.  That cost is tough
to calculate, but it can be devastating.

Maintainance is another cost.  To keep your machine up and running one must
spend a significant amount of time tweaking or whatever.  Count up your time
spent and multiply it by your hourly rate.  Then multiply it times two.
Cause not only are you having to outlay your time but are *losing* money as
well because you aren't billing.

Security costs are pretty expensive.  Obviously a hack is going to be very
expensive.  How many people are able to spend the time to secure a box
properly?  That costs money to do right.  Its a pay me now or pay me later.
Either you lock down the machine significantly and make an up-front
investment.  Or you wait until you get hacked, and then amortize it over the
time that you didn't get hacked to find out your per month cost.  Then add
the expense to you reputation.

Basically its going to cost you time & more downtime or less downtime and
money to operate. 

> I guess from what your saying we should pay the manufactur our blood money
> so we might get upgrades that prevent our boxes from getting hacked.

I'm just saying: be smart.  Take into account all expenses--including
maintenance, potential downtime, security concerns, as well as initial
outlay.  Running a server is the sort of thing that requires immediate
response.  If you don't have the necessary resources in-house there is going
to be monetary costs involved with running a 24x7 operation.  And it isn't
included in the cost of the server.

This is another thing.  When you buy an appliance--a toaster, or even a
stove--you aren't going to be loosing money if it doesn't work quite right
or it breaks.  But you will if its your web site.  THis is why restaurants
purchase high-end equipment (toasters in the restaurant industry routinely
cost > $1000, just as servers can be exponentially more expensive than
desktops) from restaurant supply companies.  If a grill is down, they are
losing money.  For this reason they also have mechanics that all they do is
fix restaurant equipment.  Its a cost of doing business.  The restaurant
manager could chose to not fix the equipment or wait for factory support but
often they'd rather stay in business.

I should write a paper: "Why server appliances aren't 'appliances'". :) I've
come up with some interesting breaks in the analogy.

>> If you need the priority support, you should be prepared to pay for it, as
>> you would with *any* hardware/software vendor.  Luckily there are several
>> ways to do this: purchasing from a VAR that offers support services or
>> purchasing priority support from Cobalt.
> 
> priority support is a diffrent issue.

Well I think isn't this what we are talking about?  Nobody is really
claiming that Cobalt support sucks, rather that they can be slow to respond,
etc.  So I think isn't priority service (i.e. can't wait til tomorrow) at
the heart of the issue?

-k