cle, Sun, and IBM have just begun to commit to Linux. A Windows NT license costs about $300. A Linux license costs nothing. Not much overhead, but the real costs come later: lost income from downtime or unfixed bugs, high prices for technical employees who make things go, and extra machines and software as the site grows. There's a notable lack of consensus as to whether Linux or NT delivers a lower total cost of ownership. TCO, as the bean counters call it, is one of those numbers derived more from bookkeeping than science, so it's easy for two companies to report wildly different results. I found that most everyone thinks their system is the right one, price-wise. More interesting is that they consider the biggest cost advantages to be faster turnaround time for solving problems and getting new features launched and not the lower price tag. It doesn't matter how good your Web site is if it's down or so slow that surfers hit their Back buttons. When it comes to staying up instead of locking up, Linux got high praise from everyone I talked with. NT owners were notably less enthusiastic about its reliability but pointed out that on a larger site, a load balancing device such as Cisco Local Director can hide downtime by sending traffic to other servers while one reboots. Several managers said the more frequent reboots were an acceptable cost compared to, say, hiring pricey Unix Administrators. Scalability is a word that gets thrown around a lot, especially when beating up on Microsoft. In IT jargon, it means the ability to increase the size of a system in such a way that the associated overhead costs - hardware, downtime, administration work - go down in proportion to the overall size of the system, instead of staying the same or going up. If your Web site's traffic grows by a factor of 10 in the next year, ideally, you should only have to pay for the extra hardware that the traffic passes through, keeping all other costs the same. This i...
