Fun Fact: Google's Revenue is $17,066 Per Server
I read about this on Bert Amijo's blog. 3Tera CEO Vlad Miloushev did the math:
1. Google's infrastructure consists of 500,000 to 1 million servers.
2. Google's Q4, 2006 revenue was $3.2 billion. On an annualized basis, that's $12.8 billion.
If you divide #2 by #1, you'd get $12,800 to $25,600 of revenue per server. If you take the average and divide the amount by 12, you'd end up with $1,422/month in sales for each server. Google spends about 10% of its revenue on operations, which equals $142 per server.
As a point of reference, let's consider HostGator's announcement that it will expand its presence at The Planet. HostGator currently leases 1,700 servers, which are home to 500,000 websites. That's 294 sites per server. If HostGator collected as little as $4.84 from each site owner, it'd generate more revenue per server than Google!
HostGator's cheapest service plan costs $6.95/month, but it allows customers paying $9.95 or more to host multiple sites. Which most - including HostGator's 10,000 resellers - do. So Brent doesn't have Larry and Sergey beat. Yet. But while I was doing the calculations above, I remembered a conversation with Lenkov from SiteKreator. Thanks to some kind of caching magic (which ISP-Planet discusses in this article), Lenkov's software can support up to 30,000 simple websites on a two CPU machine.
Let's say Brent springs for a quad core Clovertown from The Planet, hosts only 15,000 websites, and charges each site owner $1/month. This would put him ahead of Google in terms of both revenue/hosting expense ratio, and sales per server.
ISP-Planet says SiteKreator can be licensed for an "unpublished fee". I'll have to ask Lenkov about that...
One of the Web hosting industry's longest-standing citizens, Isabel Wang is also a high-tech enthusiast. Through her WHIR blog, she examines the impact emerging Web technologies will have on the Web hosting business, and on the motivations of hosting consumers.
Isabel has been in the web hosting ... (Read full bio)
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Comment by Anonymous on Saturday, April 28, 2007
Interesting read - and mind-boggling, too! Thanks for sharing!
Comment by Anonymous on Monday, July 30, 2007
Great article.
Thats a great set of figures!!
Now I wonder what the cost of managment and software/B/w etc comes too?? $$$$
Comment by Anonymous on Friday, November 02, 2007
The revenue figures per server are too high. Google has well over a million servers. See my post <a href="http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=213" target="_blank">Google's 650,000 core warehouse-sized computer</a>. And that is just one of two data centers in a single location.
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I've researched and written extensively on Google infrastructure.