I rent my Cobalt Raq3 servers from a company in the UK, and I recently asked them to carry out a memory upgrade from 128Mb to 512Mb. This I thought was a reasonable request, and expected a one-off price of around £150 ($200). But the price I got from them was £65 ($90) per month. I would be grateful if anyone would just supply me with comments and experiences of what they have paid in the past for memory, either offlist or onlist.
The RAQ's use bog standard PC100 SDRAM modules - a 256Mb module is about UK£40-50 + VAT these days (we use memory by Crucial which is by no means the cheapest) - you would remove the 128Mb you have now and replace with 2 x 256Mb instead to make 512Mb.
Actual cost is about £100 + VAT at most for the memory - takes at most 30 minutes (at most) to get a RAQ out of a rack - take the lid off and install the memory and then re-rack so perhaps another £30-50 for the engineers time makes a "reasonable" cost of around £100-150 + VAT so it seems very strange they charge you a monthly charge at all?
I think they may just have made a mistake as that cost is £780 per year for something that is a one-off upgrade costing a fraction of that. Is that cost your new mothly rental for the RAQ as that is more likely the price you would expect for the whole server from scratch!
If you need the links for suitable memory let me know! Thanks...