Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Placing a Dollar Value on System Usage?

Posted by Cliff on from the estimating-costs-and-padding-fees dept.

Anonymous SysAdmin asks: "I wonder how do system admins put a dollar value on system resources? Nowadays we see many hosting providers calculating and summing system utilization like IO operations, processor usage, bandwidth, and RAM into the monthly charges (here's an example). How can they process this info and most importantly how can they put a dollar value on it? What are the common practices in the industry and what are the tools used?"

4 of 26 comments (clear)

  1. I thought it was traditional by camelrider · · Score: 4, Informative

    Have read "The Cuckoo's Egg" by Cliff Stoll

  2. system accounting by kevin+lyda · · Score: 4, Informative

    they use freebsd. so they're probably using the system accounting tools in most unix/linux systems. see the accton(8), lastcomm(1), acct(2), acct(5) and sa(8) man pages.

    --
    US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
    1. Re:system accounting by cyb97 · · Score: 2, Informative

      Or linux compiled with BSD-accounting, and using the acct-package (which contains acct, sa, ac, etc.)...

  3. Talk to your bean counter by abulafia · · Score: 4, Informative
    In a former life, I had to do this for a dot com. This was on a consulting basis, and as an annoying (for me) side project.
    The companie's CFO and I worked together on it. In general, take the cost of the machine, the depeciation cycle, the cost of maintaining the machine (admin time, support, replacement parts, bandwidth, hosting or space in the office, etc.) to get a cost per time unit. Then, using a system accounting package, estimate CPU, disk and bandwidth usage.

    At this point, the accountant has to determine reasonable values for each of those, and not being an accountant, I can't speak to how that is done. Once you're this far, though, costing is simply division.

    If you need to price it, that's a different matter entirely.

    --
    I forget what 8 was for.