The hidden cost of OpenX Enterprise vs OpenX Hosting
It’s been over a year since OpenX published a whitepaper, which went on to detail the hidden costs of hosting an OpenX server yourself, compared to using their enterprise service.
A year on we decided to inquire with OpenX enterprise about their updated pricing model and compare it to our managed OpenX hosting solution.
According to their white paper they calculate that the cost of running an OpenX server is $300/mo., for an 8 core machine with 16GB of RAM. For our largest OpenX cluster we actually use 8 core, 8GB machines. Adding to this our fully managed support which covers everything from installation, to configuration, and optimization, the total comes to $425/mo including backups.
OpenX claims 1 server can only serve 25,000,000 monthly ad impressions
After some quick math, that equates to 9.64 requests per second. That will hardly peg the resources on a dual Quad Core server.
We serve 1,310,000,000 monthly ad impressions on 1 server
That’s 52x higher. Running lighttpd for our high performance OpenX clusters allows us to service 400-700 requests per second.
Our cost for 1,310,000,000 impressions: $425/mo.
OpenX Enterprise cost: $11,000/mo.
Thats 25x sur-charge.
Our managed OpenX hosting solution also includes backups, unlimited technical support, installation, configuration, and optimization.
Even the low estimate that OpenX themselves quoted, which is 25M monthly ad impressions per server could be run from a single machine for $425/mo., or for $1,500/mo through OpenX Enterprise.
This should come as no surprise to anyone, as an Open Source solution is always far more cost effective than anything with “Enterprise” in the title.
