🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <mQHfAKC1eYS8EwdB@xerez.nospam.co.uk>, Shez 
<news@xerez.demon.co.uk> writes
>Actually I think I got my costings a little off - that was the cost for
>10 MB. If you're buying decent quality IBM 60GXP disks then 20MB could
>cost as much as 4p. Alternatively you could get Maxtor disks at about 3p
>for 20MB. If extra speed or reliability is needed, a RAID configuration
>will do it.
>
>As for the cost of extra machines or racks, an alternative is to replace
>older smaller disks with large ones, e.g. put a 120GB drive in to
>replace an old 20GB one. This pushes up the effective price per MB a bit
>but will probably be cheaper than adding more hardware.

This is getting OT, but I'm afraid Shez that there are many, many issues 
other than the actual cost of the disk array that you (and most) are 
unaware of.

To start from the outside in, a single permanent feed into the Internet 
with an adequate bandwidth for a modest customer base will cost about 
�2K to setup, with an annual fee of about �5K. And you need to provide 
fail-over. Then of course you need nameservers. Then to provide a modest 
degree of security you need to install routers (with sufficient 
bandwidth) and firewalls (again with sufficient bandwidth). You'll need 
several routers to maintain subnets within the DNZ. Each of the 
functional areas (e.g. NNTP, SMTP, POP3) should also have their own 
firewalls. Then as you get nearer to the disk array itself, you need 
gigabyte switches to permit multiple accesses to the disk array, with 
the routers to direct the switching.

Most reasonably resilient systems use a system of traffic-controlled 
switches to provide load-sharing/failover. And with this you need to 
double-up on the switches and the servers (again to provide a reasonable 
degree of resilience).

Then (apart from the in-house support at various levels) you have to 
budget for the ongoing third-party support for all the servers. routers, 
switches etc - which isn't cheap.

In conclusion, you might note that few ISPs turn in much of a profit - 
many (like Freeserve) fail to get into the black. The investment is 
massive - and the capital investment (aka interest) has to be serviced.

If you get charged too much, folk scream, if you get modest diskspace 
folk scream, and if the service is crappy - folks scream. Funding all 
these costs is somewhat more that the charge your local PC World puts on 
its hard drives.

Relatively recently, I was involved in putting together a BT 
Syncordia/Barclays system and the cost was �3.7M - plus of course the 
running costs - and that wasn't an overly large system.

The first Internet account that I had some nine years ago (with Pipex) 
cost me �300 per year (about �2K at today's equivalent). I think we all 
do pretty well today.
-- 
Tony Morgan