> > Old Computerworlds from the time had a lot of ads for timesharing > > services. > > That was before everyone decided it was far cheaper and saner to own > and administer their own systems. > (ahem.)
I will say on the personal side, as someone who has run their own do-everything server continuously since 1998 (and I'm sure I'm hardly the longest running person on this list), it's without a doubt cheaper to just buy a VM slice nowadays. In fact, my backup mail exchanger is a FreeBSD slice on the lowest tier since all it has to do exchange mail when the main machine goes down. Currently, my monthly bill is $400 for the T1 (it's what I could get out here that was server-grade) and somewhere around $150-$200 for power, plus my time when the crap hits the fan and parts need to be ordered and installed. Then there's the amortized cost of the $10,000 POWER6 I've used since 2010, though I freely admit that purchase was overkill (the Apple Network Server it replaced was also around $10,000 but I got that for "work for us over the summer and we'll throw in the equipment you're already using"; the POWER6 was convenient since it runs all of the ANS' AIX binaries without comment). The VM slice costs $20. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckai...@floodgap.com -- 1-GHz Pentium-III + Java + XSLT == 1-MHz 6502. -- Craig Bruce --------------
