There are lots of questions: what will the servers be doing? Transcoding video is going to take lots of horsepower. Serving static pages is going to take less. Where are you going to cost? Managed hosting like Rackspace or doing-it-yourself Amazon S3.

In the story you linked to, they share this info: '2k active users/compute server, 20k active users/disk server'. I'd grab a number like 2k/server, factor in some Rackspace boxes and you're off to the races.

The way fishtrain has based these figures is all around capital expenditure - most companies wouldn't actually do this.

Facebook is running order of magnitude 10k servers. So in that respect his "servers required for the load" figures are about right.

Taking $2k, then fishtrain's annual estimates for ~10k plus servers is too low - it would be more like $20m. Again, the way fishtrain has gone about it wrt to CAPEX is different.

The electricity consumption seems a bit high, but for a business plan it might not be unreasonable.

Bandwidth - well that depends totally on your application.

Commissioning a server isn't necessarily cheap - there is the cost of the server itself, the labour, networking, test, etc, etc. This can be a fairly significant one-time cost (and isn't capitalised).

People tend to worry about the ongoing cost of storage a bit too much, particularly if you're retaining a lot of data (e.g. keeping people's images). The fact is that the cost of storage steadily decreases, so this usually amortizes this in reality. So I'd say you'd only need to worry about the increments in most cases - unless your application is horrendously storage hungry.

1. Web Cache Server $3k

2. SAN $4k

3. A nice Database Server $7k

4. 1u dell machines for web serving $1.5k ea.

5. Load balancer $3k

You need affordable bandwidth and sever colocation.I am not sure about in Ohio, but I utilize calpop.com with a half-rack and 10mbps bandwidth but they are in California.

But then again I live 10 years behind the times. One day I will stop using font tags, center tags, tables, Windows 2000, and ASP 3.0. But then again no need to change what works.

Words fail.