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Comment by josteink | Hacker News Reader

It means that hosting your code suddenly goes from a simple equation about what hardware will cost you, in terms of actual servers, virtual servers or other solutions to a matter of involving licensing software just to have your code run.

It means that if you ever need to scale up, you'll have to buy more licenses. It prohibits unlimited, automatic scaling.

It's also the once a month embarassing ordeal with sites being down due to server reboots after another round of Windows Update.

I deploy lots of stuff to Windows-servers, but I can see why some people would avoid it if they can.

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Everytime I see someone talking about "unlimited" something my spider sense ticks off. Except for Google, Amazon and some other big guys, most of companies will worry about lots of things before what you mentioned become a problem.

Also, AWS, Azure and AppHarbor have takem the license problem out of the way.

AWS doesn't really take the license problem away -- it just rolls the cost into the price of the instance, which is significantly higher for Windows.

And will only become a problem when you reach a huge scale. If by that time it is still a problem then maybe your problem is not having a good enough business model.

We're seed-funded and have somewhere around 70 instances in AWS, almost all Linux. In our business, our margin depends largely on our operational costs, and using Windows would be a significant hit to our bottom line.

So if you had to double your servers (say to 140) would you be at loss?

I hope that this is just the initial phase of the company (although not too initial since you need 70 instances) and that you will get to a better margin along the way. Otherwise ANY bump you hit road ahead will break you.

Competing on a market that relies entirely on price is a death sentence, unless of course this is your plan.

> Everytime I see someone talking about "unlimited" something my spider sense ticks off.

Sure. For some values of unlimited it's purely an academic question. But if you can scale automatically to handle double load (which is a more real concern) chances are you can scale further without any other changes.

And yes, AWS, Azure and AppHarbour all have some of the licensing issues handled for you, but that can also be clearly seen when faced with the costs.

Again, I' not saying that nobody should ever use a Windows server for anything. I use it myself. I just say that I can see several reasons why people would chose to avoid it.

This. If you're just running a single server inside your enterprise firewall that will only need to scale as the company hires new employees, it's probably fine. However, if you need something that can grow with demand from customers (which is usual 3-5 orders of magnitude greater growth than you'd see from your employee base).. then the licensing and costs become prohibitive.

Actually it means that you may need to consider a solution like Azure if you have a public facing site or app and if you want a MS solution.

There's other ways of patching servers besides all-at-once...

But what you're not understanding is that they're costs to the alternatives. There's costs to deploying on Linux. There's costs to building software in Java as opposed to C#. There's costs to hiring Linux sys admins as opposed to windows sys admins.

If you don't look at the big picture costs than you lose out on a lot of options.

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