Welcome to the New Slashdot Chicago Cluster
Thanks to everyone who tested on Friday, as well as to all of SourceForge's netops crew, our corporate overlords at SourceForge for paying the bill, and of course all the engineers on Slashteam- Jamie McCarthy, Tim Vroom, Chris Nandor, Chris Brown, and Scott Collins, we are now running on the new iron in a cage in Chicago. We'll run a story in a few days about the ridiculously overpowered new hardware we have now, but now is the part of sprockets where we dance.
Most of the old hardware is exactly that.. really old hardware.. some will be repurposed.. but most will be scrapped.
- U
Having worked for many large websites that have a boat load of visitors every day I think I can give a little insight. (As well as having worked for many web hosting datacenters)
More than likely they have a good deal on bandwdith, assume they use 500Mbps a month, a traceroute from seattle shows they're using at least savvis as one provider. We can safely say they're probably paying no more than $18.00USD per month per Mbps. These are prices a small time carrier might get, they may be paying more and who knows how many other providers they're paying for or if they just buy a blend from their colo center.
Lets put that price at: $9000/month so far
Then you factor in the floor usage, normally you can get a full rack for about 2000 with 40a. I'm willing to bet they use at least 60a per rack, add in another 500. Plus they say they have a cage, they charge extra per square foot, a guess would put the cage at an extra 1000 per month.
So I'd say about 3 racks with a cage would cost around: $8500/month
So far the total is about $17,500.
Now if they staffed their own people and didn't have any outside monitoring or anything of that nature that might be the total cost. In reality they probably have a contract with their provider for one site maintenance, 24/7 on site support, hardware replacement and the likes.
At my current place of employ we pay 30,000/mo a month for that kind of service, I think we're a bit above what one would normally pay but we have a pretty high up time SLA.
Add another 10,000 a month for maintenance/support/supply contracts.
Grand total I'd say is about $27,000/month USD. It might be higher or lower depending on their deal with their providers but normally for a standard colo deal it's around that price.
I've seen sites pay out well above that (100,000+) for colocation and have an awesome return.