This is great information and in light of the AWS outage of last week - I would recommend a hybrid model. Just as you recommend AVPC be used for dev/testing - y

This is great information and in light of the AWS outage of last week - I would recommend a hybrid model. Just as you recommend AVPC be used for dev/testing - you could potentially achieve an ideal hybrid by deploying some smaller % of the dedicated hardware and having AWS fulfill elastic capacity needs. Obviously this is determined by your application specifics, but there are a lot of deployment methods to consider. The biggest issue I take point with in your assessment, however, is the networking gear cost at 10% being far too low. You can get fair LB capabilities from low cost vendors like Coyote, but your switch infrastructure will likely be much higher than 10K unless you're doing some bare bones setup with 1U stacks and no redundancy. Further, I would expand this model and add stand-by and failover hardware in the calc. In which case I would round up to 60 servers and have a tertiary DB box as well. Finally, I would add a support/contingency budget of 15% for emergency gear replacements. In the case of staff -- there is a strong likelihood that you would need more staff to dedicated setups than you would with the hosted setups: You need your staff to have more specialized skills in DB, routing, sys-ad etc. You also need to consider that you'll have more support costs for round the clock and on call support. While you have these costs with AWS, they are lessened as your staff are fundamentally in a reactionary state only with AWS - there is no proactive PM on hardware etc with AWS - you simply respond when outages occur and wait to regain access to your affected systems. Staff on call would be required to be able to delve much deeper to root cause any outages you have in a dedicated environment, travel to the site and physically mitigate any gear failures. Overall though, this is a fantastic perspective that everyone should have in Excel and type in their own numbers.