1) I stated it as a requirement. 2) The projects I work at on $DAY_JOB that I control all have 3 hardware nodes for HA in both staging & production. Staging is

1) I stated it as a requirement. 2) The projects I work at on $DAY_JOB that I control all have 3 hardware nodes for HA in both staging & production. Staging is under artificial load that plays back the same series of events on dummy data. [e.g. Job A runs -> Completes -> Puts a mock job in Staging's Job Queue -> runs on Staging with mocked data -> I randomly restart a node to see what happens] Buying 3 1Us is $750 for a staging environment. If you have 1 DC availability, you can just put them on your Local LAN (Free). http://www.ebay.com/itm/Sun-Oracle-x4140-1U-Server-2x-Opteron-2431-Six-Core-32GB-SSD-SAS-RAID-2x-146GB-/141396271527?pt=COMP_EN_Servers&hash=item20ebdfe1a7 http://www.ebay.com/itm/Sun-Oracle-x4140-1U-Server-2x-Optero... Now, you suddenly have a rough approximation of a 3 Node / 1 DC environment. But what if you have multiple DCs, 3 Nodes per DC, Hot/Cold Loadbalancers and have DNS Failover Between Them?! Say, you run a LBx2+Nodex3/LBx2+Nodex3/LBx2+Nodex3 across 3 DCs. Assuming you automate the build, you could just pay by hour. But if not... Linode's Failover IPs let you do the Hot/Cold LB thing [$60 for 3 DCs worth]. 3 Nodes per DC [$40 Nodes for 4096 MB is probably more than enough to test most issues]. $360 So for $420/month, you could replicate a pretty big real world setup. What if you have 25 servers like stackoverflow and a hot/cold DC setup that is all Linux? http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/7/21/stackoverflow-update-560m-pageviews-a-month-25-servers-and-i.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/7/21/stackoverflow-upda... Linode's Failover IPs let you do the Hot/Cold LB thing [$40 for 2 DCs worth]. 13 Nodes per DC [$40 Nodes for 4096 MB is probably more than enough to test most issues]. $520 $560/month you can basically duplicate the 2 coast hot/cold setup with 26 servers. But its expensive! ...unless this is a one-man operation, not really. A fully loaded junior engineer is a minimum of $120k. A robust staging environment is very useful and isn't going to cost more than 1 engineer month to setup. Yes, you might not use the same hardware. However, it is close enough and honestly...the same hardware 1:1 with real servers [based on the ebay servers] and a rack at Fremont w/ Hurricane Electric is $600/month. 13 servers is $3,250 in hardware. Get someone else on the East Coast in like Buffalo, NY and you can get as close as your budget affords. I doubt you'd hit 1 Junior Engineer Year worth of $$. Not really Free. Power and A/C are things you'll pay for but its not a notable cost [less than $100/month].