Yup.<p>&gt; had to spend a lot of money on getting things<p>When I was at IBM&#x27;s Watson lab, the PC 
on my desk had parts worth a total of
$50,000+.<p>When I bought my first PC at home, from
Gateway, it cost me $10,000+.  Single core,
90 MHz clock.<p>Later a friend and I considered a startup,
I went shopping, and saw that parts
for a good PC would run ballpark $6,000 --
we didn&#x27;t do the startup!<p>Later I wanted a more up to date PC,
and the parts cost about $5000.
So, single core 1.8 GHz processor,
that is 1800 &#x2F; 90 = 20 times
faster for half as much money.<p>Now I&#x27;m shopping for the first server
for my startup.  I&#x27;ve been assuming that
the parts would cost about $2000.
Nope:  How about $1000, for 
a processor with 8 cores,
at 4.0 GHz, with 32 GB of ECC
main memory, etc.<p>But I already have a spare 
screen and power supply,
now really want to do backup
from one hard disk to another,
both internal, and to a 
2 TB external hard disk via
USB so don&#x27;t need Blu-Ray.<p>And good 1 TB hard disks go for
about $60 and, thus, make
room enough for internal
disk to disk backup 
surprisingly cheap and
easier than working with
Blu-Ray disks.<p>And main memory prices are 
significantly lower:  E.g.,
the Kingston, 32 GB of
1600 MHz ECC main memory<p>KVR16E11K4&#x2F;32<p>was $429 but now 
is easy enough to find
for $230.99, nearly half price.<p>So, $700 gets such an 8 core
box.<p>But, for my first server, really
not sure I need the full 8 cores,
32 GB of main memory right away
so could
settle for 4 cores with a slightly
slower clock and 16 GB of main
memory and three disk drives
1 TB each, for under $400.<p>So, start with a $400 server
and, if it stays busy sending
Web pages with ads, then 
the ad revenue just from
on the way to getting busy
should be much more than
needed for some high end
servers.<p>And now 1 GbE IP routers are
much cheaper, too!<p>And for $90 a month
my ISP can give me
a connection with a static
IP address, no ports blocked,
and upload bandwidth
of 35 Mbps.  Half fill
that 24 x 7 sending Web pages
with ads, and should be
able to show a profit!<p>Several US locations
have 1 GbE service!<p>Prices, they&#x27;ve been a coming down!<p>It used to be, to bring up a 
busy Web
site, needed big bucks to, say, Sun
and maybe a T3 leased line, etc.<p>Now nearly everything about bringing
up a Web site is much easier and cheaper
than 10-15 years ago.<p>E.g., my startup is based on
Windows, so I get to use IIS and
ASP.NET for the Web site,
ADO.NET and SQL Server 
for the data base,
parts of the rest of .NET
for more, e.g., de&#x2F;serialization
of instances of classes
for program to program communications
over TCP&#x2F;IP sockets.  Some big
sites use this infrastructure;
it should work well enough for
my startup!<p>E.g., I
wrote my own Web site session
state server key-value store using
TCP&#x2F;IP sockets, de&#x2F;serialization,
and two instances of a .NET
collection class.  The .NET collection
class was great fun to use!
Terrific infrastructure.<p>Much easier, cheaper than 10-15 years ago!