Most people over estimate hardware cost. Buying a 300-500GB ram server maybe very expensive. But buying a distributed data base expert likely costs at least an order of magnitude higher per year.
Same server in AWS, it'll cost $50k+/month for the same thing. SO just bought it one time fee for probably around $30k or so, I'll say they are doing something right!
The don't have servers with that much RAM, but a 244GB RAM server with 8x800GB SSDs and 32 cores costs <$5k a month ad-hoc and about $1300/month with a 3 year commitment.
$1300/month w/ a 3 year commitment is $46.8k over the lifespan. Which is more then 4x more then the actual hardware cost. Your ROI on a physical server with the same stats at that price tag would be 8 months.
Not saying its totally worth it, but the upside is that they take care of power costs, physical space costs, networking, and if the hardware fails they'll put your application on a new server. Basically you take all of the risk out the equation.
Sure, but add power and cooling for these things plus physical space? (I remember when these big db's needed the floors in the data centre reinforcing since they were a > metric ton )
Still, I agree re. the difference in price. I'd buy too
Worth noting: AWS also doesn't have Enterprise SQL available, so plan on buying that yourself. That's a not-so-insignificant piece of the overall cost to many people.
