Step 3: More Database Speed, Please

But lets go with a general solution. We're going to get a midrange Solaris box, with Oracle 8 (FrontBase doesn't run on Solaris, so that's not an option, but it served us well in the meantime.) So that will be say, $35,000 in additional hardware, plus another week of engineering, for $41,000 in incremental cost. If we used FrontBase in the previous step, we now need to get Oracle 8, so that's an additional $15,000.

At this point, we can double our tpm license for WebObjects up to 100 tpm for $5000. Since we've spent $65,000 so far, this isn't a big deal, nile.com makes that in a couple of hours.

To get to the next step, lets look at some economics. If our new setup can max out our WO license, then we're serving 100 pages/minute on nile.com. That's 10 sales per minute. Or $120000/week in profit.

Conversely, if we're down a week, we lose $120000 in lost profit. Plus lost future sales, which we'll ignore. Plus another week of engineering at $6K as you run around madly trying to rebuild everything. Total: $126,000/week.

For yippee.com, if our application is down for a day, those 1,920 users we're serving each day won't be very productive! If they're each making $36,000/year on average, and they lose one hour each day we're down, that's $90/per user/per week, or $172,800 for 1,920 users.

Maybe we should start building in some redundancy.

Next Page: Step 4, Backups? Who needs backups! Ooops...

Nile.com bottom line:
	Initial Engineering	$72,000
	HW investment:	$78700
	Network:	$1000/month.
	Max ppm:	100 (limited by WO license)
	Max profit:	$480,000/month

Yipee.com bottom line:
	Initial Engineering	$24,000
	HW investment:	$78700
	Network:	$1000/month.
	Max ppm:	100 (limited by WO license)
	Pages/day:	48,000
	Max users:	1,920
	Cost per user/month:	$5.87