Step 1: Starting Small

Total cost for the hardware and software is now $3200, plus our T1 at $1000/month. Deployment for one year is $15200, plus the initial development brings us to $87,200 for nile.com, and $39,200 for yippee.com.

This is the second place where some people complain about the expense of WebObjects. The logic is something like this: My maximum throughput on my T1 for Nile.com is 2 pages/second. So I really need a 120 page/per/minute license. For Yippee.com, its 9 pages/second, so I need a 540 page/second license.

On the face of this, they're right! The problem is, the logic you use to choose the hardware shouldn't necessarily be the logic you use to choose the software.

Here's what most people miss. You can upgrade your WO license at any time. So don't do it until you have to Also, there's another limit and that's the database transaction limit.

Let's look at nile.com. 120 pages/minute will saturate your T1. But that 120 pages/minute is 1200 database transactions/minute. For Yippee.com at 540 pages/minute, we have 13500 transactions/minute. If we compare the database transactions to our 50 ppm WebObjects license, we won't need to upgrade WebObjects until we can exceed 500 tpm on our database for nile.com, and 1250 tpm for yippee.com.

In other words, you're not going to serve all those database transactions, your images, and WebObjects off of one G3. A single G3 machine is a good place to start, but you don't need that unlimited WO license yet! You've got to upgrade your database hardware first. Now you might think that you could call up one of these database companies and find out what sort of hardware you need to support that many database transactions. No such luck, because the answer is: "It depends". Its going to depend on your database contents as much as it depends on your hardware. Some databases are limited by RAM, some by disk speed, some by CPU.

The thing to remember, is that in general, you hit the database limit before you hit the WO transaction limit so the next step is to upgrade your hardware to handle more database transactions.

Since we're running everything off one machine, our system capacity at this point is capable of 200 database transactions per minute. That means 20 pages per minute for nile.com, and 8 pages per minute for yippee.com. There's nothing wrong with being able to spit out a page every three seconds, for nile.com that means we're grossing over $19,200 in profit a month.

Next Page: Step 2, Move our Database & Images

Nile.com bottom line:
	Initial Engineering	$72,000
	HW investment:	$3200.
	Network:	$1000/month.
	Max ppm:	20 (limited by database, estimate of 200 tpm)
	Max profit:	$19,200/month.
	Net profit:	$18,200/month

Yipee.com bottom line:
	Initial Engineering	$24,000
	HW investment:	$3200.
	Network:	$1000/month.
	Max ppm:	8 (limited by database, estimate of 200 tpm)
	Pages/day:	3,840
	Max users:	154
	Cost per user/month:	$24.16