I am gonna actually drop deets on what it actually costs to host things in a datacenter.
SO I have a very modest professional-type setup in a value datacenter:
Datacenter space is measured in things called rack units, which get aggregated into units of racks and then cages which hold X number of cabinets. It makes more sense when you understand the physical setup:
You can see 19 RU there with 15/19 RU of 1RU servers.
And the cabinets end up like this:
So that 10 rack units of datacenter space in the first picture are what’s called a ‘quarter cabinet’ since its 10U/42U of a standard cabinet and since the bill just came this is what it costs me per month:
And this is me doing on the cheap. (Cheap space and power and bandwidth all rolled into a single bill) I see the same sorts of of invoices at work for cages of 9-20 cabinets and the total monthly costs for power and space plus network cabling (NOT bandwidth) for a single location ends up being six figures– equivalent to my yearly salary per month.
This is just for the space and the electricity. The costs don’t include purchasing equipment, bandwidth to connect this to everything else, or the people who actually run it.