One of the things that I feel is causing a decline in our midrange
community, and IBMi in general, is *easy* access to the IBMi OS for hobby
type programmers. Today's hobby programmers are tomorrows ISVs that will
build applications to give IBMi its lifeblood.
I have recently started searching for providers that offer "IBMi in the
cloud" hosting. Basically I am wanting to find companies that offer
*small(er)* virtual IBMi LPARs that I can lease on a monthly basis. I
learned of a couple of companies that do in fact offer IBMi hosted solutions
in a data center environment. I have only communicated with one so far, but
I was quite surprised by how much it would cost to have them host an IBMi
machine. Here are two pricing scenarios from one vendor:
*Scenario 1:* For them to host an IBMi that I already own it would be
$2000-$2500/month. This includes a lot of things like tape backup, data
center location, unlimited bandwidth, 24/7 support.
*Scenario 2*: This is where they purchase all the hardware/software (just
OS, DB and ILE compilers in my case) for you and you pay a monthly fee and
agree to a 3yr commitment. The price for this is an ADDTIONAL $2500/mnth on
top of scenario #1 for a total montly cost of $4500 to $5000/mth.
These costs aren't the worst if you are a well established company because
you can get A LOT of horse power out of a v7.1 520 machine and not requiring
a dedicated sys admin. But this is way to cost prohibitive for a start-up
ISV that hopes to sell a piece of IBMi software for the first time, or for
the hobby developer that wants to host their own website.
*Contrast that with my current scenario as an ISV* where I am leasing a v6.1
entry level 520 for roughly *$170/month *which is a very reasonable amount
for a company that has a 5yr old RPG product. The only reason I am able to
get a machine that reasonable is because I get the necessary software for
50% off (i.e. RPG compilers and such) and the rest of the machine at 1 to 2%
of the total cost per month in a lease form.
I know there are a handful of timeshare services out there that offer you a
couple libraries and profiles for $20 to $50 per month, but those are VERY
restrictive (personal experience) in what they allow you to do.
In the end I am more researching to see if there are "IBMi in the cloud"
type hosting companies out there that would lease on a monthly basis at a
reasonable price (i.e. $50 to $100 per month) for an entry level LPAR. To
set the stage, here are some numbers from the hosting provider Krengel Tech
uses for a number of things (though we have a dedicated server vs. a shared
server):
http://hosting.com/cloudhosting/vps/ ($55 to $65 per month)
Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com
http://mowyourlawn.com/blog/
midrange.com
