[olddog]

To those who think a you can buy a server for peanuts, like a you can a PC, here is my real world experience.

In 2007, I put in a Dell high availability server, for a data base to collect process control history. This is actually two physical servers that software ties them together to look like one server. It's called a Cluster. So to all the devices sending information to the data server, they see one server. Inside the cluster there are two servers, one doing the work the other in standby, ready to take over, if the primary fails, thus high availability

Server Operating System Software is licensed and priced based on what it is going to do. The word used to measure the work escapes me at the moment. My operating system licence was $3000 and it can go over $10000, depending on what you are doing.

Then you need to buy a Sequel Server License if you want a data base to store information, and you need a drive array that contains pairs of drives, so that one drive failure will not loose data.

Bottom line my little project was over $20,000. It is now 10 years old. The operating system is so obsolete, it is no longer supported and a vulnerability risk the size of the ice burg that sank the Titanic. The whole server should have been replaced 3 yrs ago. So if you do the math, on average, it costs about $3000 per year to run my server correctly, if nothing ever failed (that never happens).

My application is a tiny spec compared to say a Bank or other large corporation. Maybe Brent's Server is a bit smaller, maybe not.