Re: For Whom the Gate Tolls?

From: Tony Barry <tonyb_at_netinfo.com.au> <harnad_at_COGSCI.SOTON.AC.UK>
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 1998 05:58:15 -0400

Murray Turoff <murray_at_eies2.njit.edu> wrote:

> First of all, I suspect the latest web server technology at a cost of
> about $20,000 would support about 5,000 users in terms of retrieving
> material like "journal articles". One person putting such a unit in
> their home and interfacing to the WEB could start a publising
> operation. After a capital investement of about $40,000, if he was
> publishing something that his users were willing to pay $25 a year for
> and he got about 4,000 subscribers he would be pulling in $100,000.
> This is much better than what a lot of people risk in most standard
> small retail store startups.

These costs seem far too high. An NT, Windows or MacOS box can easily
handle 10s of thousands of hits a day just over a phone line let alone
ISDN. I run two web servers, an SMTP server, a list server and an ftp
server on a superseded Mac 7220 with just 48 meg of memory. The only
instability comes from the phone line.

All up I've spent about $US 3000 and $US 1000pa communication costs.

Tony Barry
Received on Tue Aug 25 1998 - 19:17:43 BST