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	Rex Ballard - Director of Electronic Distribution
	Standard & Poor's/McGraw-Hill
	Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect
	the Management of the McGraw-Hill Companies.
	http://cnj.digex.net/~rballard


On Mon, 8 Jul 1996, Roger Price wrote:

> Greetings!
> 
> I have been "lurking" on the list for about a month now, and at times 
> have been made to feel a little guilty for not jumping in on every 
> thread. Well, now I have a couple of questions that I hope someone can 
> help me with.

Welcome to the list.

> Our ISP has quoted us a price of $650 per month to house mac server at 
> his office, provide our DNS and connect to our email server. He says this 
> is an "industry standard" price. Well, I'd like to know what you all 
> think. Is this fair or are we being taken to the bank?

Prices and services run a very broad range.  ANS provides 24/7 coverage,
backups, and access via DS-3 for about $2000/month.  Digex offers "Virtual
Servers" on their Sparc/Servers for as little as $100/month.

Housing your own server at your own site can run $300-$1200/month
just for communications costs.  A 24/7 operation can cost $20,000/month
for full-time operators.  A SparcServer/1000 with NetScape Publisher
server package can run over $100,000.  An Oracle text-search engine can
run nearly $500,000.  At the high end, a full-featured, fully licensed,
fully supported, "shrink-wrapped" publishing system can cost $1 Million or
more and $100,000/month to operate.

At the other end of the spectrum, an existing frame-relay line can be
appended (new PVC added) for $45/month, a Linux server running Apache on a
Pentium/75 will run $600-$900, and a two Windows Programmers or Unix
programmers can administer the system using "Linux on Laptops"
($500-$1000) and watchdog pagers ($20/month).  Some ISPs will remotely
administer a system you have in your office.

To "get your feet wet", you can start relatively cheap.  You can start
with a virtual server (make sure you have permission to do your own CGI
routines), some home-pages, and some simple accounting scripts.  When you
get a sense of what it takes to generate significant traffic (even 200
hits/day can be enough for the right people), you can start upgrading your
system.

You may want to leave the "promo pages" on the virtual servers and refer
readers to your server for the "subscription content".

P.S.,  I've spent as much as $160/year for subscriptions (to an apartment
renter's database).  If I could find a good "dating service" site (I've
tried match.com, what else?), I'd pay an extra $50-$100/year for that too.

I'm also on Clickshare and First Virtual.  I don't have a digicash or
checkfree account yet.

> My second question is somewhat technical. I was wondering if anyone has 
> had any experience with putting classifieds generated by a Harris 
> CASH/2100 system on the web. We are looking at trying to do this with 
> Filemaker Pro and Tango on our Macs. Any suggestions or ideas would be 
> greatly appreciated.

Save some time, money, and effort.  PERL is a programming language that
can recognize text patterns, perform C-like operations based on recognized
patterns (loops, conditionals, iterations, function calls...) and format
output.  It's available for Mac, NT, Linux, Unix, and OS/2.  The price is
right too (free).  It takes about 4-10 hours to learn, and about 3-6 weeks
to master.  There are lots of good samples and boilerplates for creating
format converters.  Perl can also recognize binary patterns as well.


> Thanks for the help. I will try to chime in on the discussions on a more 
> regular basis from now on.

Please do!

> Roger
> 
	Rex



From rballard@cnj.digex.net Tue Jul  9 21:43:41 1996
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