Not so many years ago we would pay quite a bit more for a home computer. Example: In 1997 I bought a Pentium Pro 200 for something close to $3000. When you consider how technology was changing at the time, it seems like a lot of money. And it was. Let's suppose you bought a computer at that time for $2400. You were lucky if it it had a useful lifetime of four years, or forty-eight months. That works out to $50 per month. All that just to be able to read email, to browse the web, and to use Microsoft Word and Excel to work at home.
Fast forward to 2005. Computers are less expensive. Needs change, too. I'm considering the options for getting a host with a public IP address. One of the options is Linode, which offers a shared virtual Linux host with a public IP address. The prices seem reasonable, compared to what we paid for a PC not so many years ago. For $20 a month, one could run a small web site, a mail server, a teredo server, a STUN server, or other geeky applications.
Posted by Doug Sauder at December 11, 2004 06:25 PM