Wikipedia is an incredibly frugal and efficient nonprofit organization. It serves half a billion visits per month. But do you know how much it costs to keep this huge website running? According to 2012-13 Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan, the expected spending is around $40 million. Some may argue that Wikipedia is just a site with "just text", why does it cost so much? Oliver Emberton shared his view.To keep Wikipedia running and serve 500 million visits per month. First, you're going to need hosting. This isn't a service you can pick up from GoDaddy (this pic is 3 years old but you get the i...

Repairs to Android smartphones cost wireless carriers $2 billion per year according to a new year-long WDS study that tracked 600,000 support calls around the globe. Android’s popularity and the introduction of a number of low-cost smartphones has put a strain on the wireless business model, WDS noted in its report. “Deployment by more than 25 OEMs and lower-cost product coming to market is leading to higher than average rates of hardware failures and, in turn, return and repair costs.” 12.6% of all technical support calls related to Android in the study were for hardware fa...

An important aspect to keep in mind with databases is the cost of cache reheating after a server restart. Consider the following diagram which shows several cache servers (e.g., memcached) in front of a database server.This sort of setup is common and can work quite well when appropriate; it removes read load from the database and allows more RAM to be utilized for scaling (when the database doesn’t scale horizontally). But what happens if all the cache servers restart at the same time, say, on a power glitch in a data center?We then have a cache reheating scenario. After the bounce the...

Computerworld - At a cloud computing conference in New York in June, a number of speakers pointed out that the cloud is moving past the hype stage and is beginning to deliver tangible benefits to organizations. These improvements include increased flexibility and agility.But moving to the cloud can also mean added costs, some of which might be unexpected, according to IT executives whose organizations have implemented cloud services or are considering them.While these types of costs don't necessarily prevent companies from getting real business value out of cloud computing initiatives, they wi...