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Microsoft Cheaper For Web Serving?
Tinman_au asks: "Bink.nu has an article titled "Leading Belgian Hosting Provider Realizes Lower TCO on Windows than Linux" that asks the following: 'Many total cost of ownership (TCO) studies have reaffirmed that TCO of a large enterprise infrastructure based on Microsoft Windows Server 2003 is lower than one based on Linux. But what about TCO in a Web hosting environment?' In the table of figures, the cost area breakout lists labour for Fedora at 77.88% with Windows .NET with SQL Server 2005 as only 53.15%. Admittedly, the report was done by Microsoft itself, so I guess it couldn't exactly be considered impartial, but not being a web admin I found myself wondering, is Windows really that much easier to look after in a web server environment, or has Microsoft fudged some numbers?"
I work for a reasonably sized host (ie. thousands of unique clients, not 25 clients like your average host who will probably reply here), and as we are a completely linux (CentOS/Fedora) host, our operating system licensing costs are $0. If we were running Windows and SQL server etc, I'd estimate that our licensing costs per year would be 5-6 figure figures for commercial MS licenses for the number of servers that we have and the MS software that we'd need.
:)
We have staff to administrate the servers, and we'd need them if were to manage windows servers. We generally only ever have 1-2 technicians available at any one time to manage all of our servers, and we'd need that many if we were managing the same number of Windows servers too. Ignoring start up training costs, which really only exist if you're migrating from Windows to Linux, staffing costs are absolutely no more for managing Linux boxes than Windows, I'd argue the opposite. Infact, if we were to migrate to Windows tomorrow, as TFA is saying we should - there would be huge initial licensing and training costs, I imagine more so than moving a Windows staff to Linux.
Sponsored by MS means this can be ignored, why do we keep posting this stuff?
Patch Tuesday?
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
Disagree. I will tag this as "Logical Development".
This study perfectly describes the problem with many Linux/Unix deployments out there. They are done by people who take the approach which they have grown accustomed to on Windows, Novell and the like and try to transfer it to Linux/Unix. This approach is best described as "everything you cannot do with the vendor tools must be done manually" and "we only use commercial/vendor software". When using this approach Linux/Unix invariably results in higher TCO because the price of labour is higher and level of one-click moron-friendly automation is lower for most cases.
When doing Linux/Unix work writing your own tools and assisting yourself in automating tasks is a part of the job and Sysadmins who do not possess the skills should not allow themselves to claim that they are Linux/Unix Sysadmins. From there on, if you estimate the costs of running and deploying systems without taking this into account you invariable come up with Windows being cheaper.
That is the reality, face it move along and ignore the study. While it was using the right analysis methods it was analysing deployments which do not use the correct design and process for either system. If you use design and processes which are wrong for one system it is not particularly surprising that you get bad TCO for it.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Ironically, I suspect your comment actually demonstrates why, in real terms, a lot of businesses find MS cheaper.
You may get more horsepower and flexibility out of a non-MS environment. That's great, and makes non-MS the way to go if a business is employing people like you.
Now, would you describe yourself (being honest) as a smarter-than-average sysadmin, a Linux/Mac/whatever specialist, an experienced geek...? In other words, are you a typical sysadmin that a typical company will hire, with typical experience on the various platforms, or would such a person require more experience/training/skill to get the same good results out of non-MS systems that you do?
On the flip side, do you (being honest) have less than average experience/skill with MS systems, perhaps as a result of specialising elsewhere, and would you therefore require more training and expertise to get the same quality of results others do out of MS server software?
Obviously, I can't read your mind, and I'm not going to put words into your fingertips by guessing your answers. But I can make an educated guess that there are a lot more people around who know how to get OKish results out of MS stuff than there are who know how to get much better results out of non-MS stuff, and that the MS-using folks therefore tend to be easier to find and cheaper to hire. That has a major effect on the bottom line of a business, and is why (for many places) MS is going to look like the safer bet on TCO grounds for at least a while yet.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
You are half the way there in your analysis.
Studies like this actually take into account the fact that the Unix/Linux sysadmin on the average is 20%+ more expensive.
They are wrong elsewhere.
They do not take into account that a selfrespecting Unix/Linux sysadmin will automate everything he/she can and will not repeat everyday mundane tasks. Instead of this they still count the time which is essential to maintain and patch the systems towards the TCO bill and multiply it by their number (correcting only for vendor tools to assist rollout where applicable). There is no correction for ad-hoc scripting and no correction for productising ad-hoc tools for internal rollout. Further to this many places go into the idiocy of prohibiting such internal software development. In fact I know one or two places where such activities are a sackable offence.
I have stopped counting how many times over the years I have heard the "We are not software developers" mantra from PHB wannabies. That is the damn difference between a high level Unix sysadmin and a Windows sysadmin in the first place. The Unix sysadmin can write in at least 2-3 rapid development languages - (k)shell, perl and/or python and the reason why he/she gets more money is exactly this. Paying him this money and not using this ability is stupid, but this is what many places do as a matter of policy. It is no wonder that places like this have better TCO under Windows compared to Unix/Linux. That is to be expected and that will continue to be the case until they start to automate mundane operations in-house, formally maintain the automation and productise/package it for internal use.
In fact the TCO numbers for systems like the one in the article (1000+ of slightly customized commodity software on commodity OS) come out in favour of Linux/Unix even if this activity is subcontracted out. They do not come out right only when it is prohibited and the work is done solely via vendor supplied tools.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Then hosting companies are behaving irrationally, including the one that is the subject of the study. If it costs less to operate a Windows platform than a Linux platform, then the hosting companies would rather have their customers use Windows platforms. This would lead them to price the Windows packages lower than the Linux packages; after all, if windows were cheaper, they could do that and still be more profitable.
Hostbasket, the subject of this study, is not doing that:
Their basic Linux package is 8 Euros/month and their basic Windows package is 10 Euros/month. So if the results of the study were true, this pricing scheme would be quite irrational.
Looking at other hosts, this seems to hold up. interhost wants 19 GBP/month for Linux versus 25 GBP/month for Windows. Over at New York Internet accepting all the defaults for their BSD plan nets a quote of about $42/month; a similar Windows-based plan is $64/month. And over at hosting.com their managed hosting plans for Windows servers start at $230/month while the same plans for Linux start at $195/month. I was able to find, over at 1and1, shared Linux hosting and shared Windows hosting that cost the same.
I was not able to find any provider that offered cheaper Windows hosting than Linux hosting.
So, assuming that everyone behaves rationally, if the numbers in this study were accurate at all, the hosting provider that is the subject of the study would offer cheaper Windows hosting than Linux hosting. They don't. If the numbers in this study were generally applicable, you'd find that most hosting providers who offer both would offer cheaper Windows hosting than *Nix hosting. They don't. I can only conclude that the study is bogus in some way and shouldn't be trusted, since it fails to predict rational behavior in a very open marketplace (i.e. one with very low barriers to entry). Businesses are very good at thinking with their wallets, and if this study were true then there's a huge money making opportunity that everyone is letting go.
.sig: file not found
Speaking as someone who set up a LAMP architecture for a Microsoft vendor, my uptimes dwarfed those of IIS with the only time I had to take the server down was for software updates. The time it took me to do my makes and set everything up perfectly the way I want took a couple hours (not that different from Windows). When I left, they decided to switch everything over to an ALL WINDOWS environment. Not counting costs involved in switching all applications over, they had to spend almost $100,000 to duplicate the setup I had for free with open source. Costs in setup are minimal in LAMP, longterm savings and uptime are HUGE!! Also with LAMP, I'm a one man army. In my old company, they had to hire contractors for the DB work separate from the web dev. More labor, higher costs. With LAMP I can keep my costs very very low. This is yet again 100% FUD from Microsoft
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
I think you hit on a REALLY good point in there. In my *nix administration, I have no daily activities! I've written programs for them all. This is almost impossible to do for most GUI's in general and more so with windows. I've always found the task scheduler to be a very weak replacement for cron and windows event log to be a weak replacement for syslog. The funny thing is... I do actually have a report I have to run manually once a week, and it's for the single windows box I maintain.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
They do not take into account that a selfrespecting Unix/Linux sysadmin will automate everything he/she can and will not repeat everyday mundane tasks.
I see no reason why a selfrespecting Windows sysadmin would not do the same.
That is the damn difference between a high level Unix sysadmin and a Windows sysadmin in the first place.
Actually, to a high level sysadmin there isn't a lot of difference between administrating Windows and Unix like operating systems.
It's a prejudice to assume that scripting like on Unix is not possible on Windows. On the contrary, many Windows sysadmins use scripting tools to automate everyday mundane tasks. In fact even the archaic MS-DOS from the eighties has its own scripting language built in. Which is used even today by nearly all Windows sysadmins.