I think this is what frustrates me. We've slowly started reducing the amount of Windows machines in our cluster as the licensing for SQL went from £160 a month per CPU up to £240 per CPU in the space of 2 years.

This is unacceptable.

We can't run a business trying to guess what this will be in another 12 months time.

Resource is a big issue, I recently fired up a small Linux box on Digital Ocean as a test; it's 512mb with a small CPU. The machine barely runs at any overhead when dormant. A Windows box is using 1GB before the operating system has finished loading