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Can someone shed some light on how much it actually costs to run your own infrastructure? Say that I use 5 large instances of RDS database and then around 100 large EC2 instances along with ELB's. This will roughly cost around $1M a year with AWS. Will running your own infrastructure be costlier than this?

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running a rack of servers will basically cost you $50k a year including the finance cost of the machines and switches.

it's not the money, it's the expertise that's the limiting factor. very few people know how to do it reliably.

I think this $50k number is way low unless you are talking bargain basement data center. Also, doesn't contemplate needed bandwidth. I agree with the expertise point, though.

Rough numbers:

Server = $5k, straight line depreciation over 3 years, 40 per rack Switches = $6k, each, "", 2 per rack Rack = $2k/month Power = $2k/month

That works out to: Servers: 40 * $138/server/month=$5555/month Servers: 2 * $333/switch/month Rent: $2000/rack/month Power: $2000/rack/month

Total: $118,656/year

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