Scaling for E-Business

4.6. Infrastructure Cost

Estimating the cost of e-business infrastructures is a key step toward a quantitative analysis of issues such as ROI (return on investment) and SLAs (service level agreements). The cost of operating a typical e-commerce site can be substantial and includes the cost of site development staff and infrastructure, i.e., hardware, software, and network services. Also, initial costs to set up an e-commerce site must be considered.

Cost models serve several purposes: i) they identify the cost of different types of transactions; ii) they can be used to answer "what-if" questions that come up in capacity planning studies, such as "What is the cost × benefit ratio of installing an additional T3 line in our e-commerce site?" As ...