total cost of ownership webinar
DESCRIPTION
Do you know how much you’re really spending to host your own ad server? It may surprise you. Watch this webinar to learn more about the ‘hard’ and 'hidden' costs associated with self-hosting.TRANSCRIPT
Total cost of ownershipTotal cost of ownership
How much are you really spending to host your ad server?
Presented by Alexander Dean, Principle, Keplar, LLP
Twitter Hashtag: #OXwebinar
Total cost of ownership (TCO)
• What is required to host your own ad server?
• What is the true cost of hosting your own ad server?
• How does this cost compare to a fully hosted solution such as OpenX Enterprise?
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We cover three distinct TCO comparisons, each one focusing on a different-sized publisher
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Size of publisher Self-hosted ad server
Hostedad server
Impression rangevs
Small, regional OpenX Source OpenX Enterprise 50m-500m
Medium, regional DART Enterprise OpenX Enterprise 200m-1bn
Large, multi-regional DART Enterprise OpenX Enterprise 500m-5bn
Total cost of ownership #OXwebinar
Anatomy of a self-hosted ad server
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SoftwareSoftware
ServersServers
StaffStaff
There are three key building blocks to hosting your own ad server:
The ad server software needs to run on one or more servers (either dedicated, cloud or VPS)
The ad server will need a systems administrator and some form of technical user support
Using one of the few installable commercial-strength ad servers (incl. OpenX Source and DART Enterprise)
Total cost of ownership #OXwebinar
Putting it all together
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The exact number and setup of servers will depend on various factors, most importantly:
The geographical distribution of the site’s visitors
The volume of ad impressions to serve, including peak volumes
Total cost of ownership #OXwebinar
Our three different TCO scenarios are based on two distinct technical architectures
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on a simple, non-load balanced architecture
on a complex, globally load balanced architecture
A small, regional publisher
11
using
22A medium sized, regional publisherusing
33A large, multi-regional publisherusing
Total cost of ownership #OXwebinar
Our benchmark: OpenX Enterprise
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For each of our TCO comparisons we will use OpenX Enterprise as the benchmark:
Total cost of ownership #OXwebinar
How we calculated the TCO for a small, regional publisher using OpenX Source
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To calculate the cost of a self-hosted, non-globally load balanced OpenX Source ad server we used the following inputs:
SoftwareSoftware
ServersServers
StaffStaff
• Assume 25m impressions / month / server
• Assume each server costs $300 / month
• Assume 25% of impressions are rich media
• Assume one technician paid $87,000 / year
• How much time spent on ad server varies from 50% to 60% based on volume
• OpenX Source is free, so no cost here
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Total cost of ownership #OXwebinar
Comparing this TCO to OpenX Enterprise
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The monthly cost of self-hosting OpenX Source scales linearly, and is 41%-225% more expensive than OpenX Enterprise:
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Total cost of ownership #OXwebinar
How we calculated the TCO for a medium sized, regional publisher using DART Enterprise
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To calculate the cost of a self-hosted, non-globally load balanced DART Enterprise ad server we used the following inputs:
SoftwareSoftware
ServersServers
StaffStaff
• Assume 25m impressions / month / server
• Assume each server costs $230 / month
• Assume 25% of impressions are rich media
• Assume one systems administrator utilised 25%-35% paid $96,000 / year
• Assume one technical support operative utilised 25%-35% paid $78,000 / year
• DART Enterprise costs $250k or $9,600 / month over 3 years
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Total cost of ownership #OXwebinar
Comparing this TCO to OpenX Enterprise
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The monthly cost of self-hosting DART in a regional setup scales linearly, and is 232%-46% more expensive than OpenX Enterprise:
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Total cost of ownership #OXwebinar
Large, multi-regional publisher using DART Enterprise: how we calculated the TCO
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To calculate the cost of a self-hosted, globally load balanced DART Enterprise ad server we used the following inputs:
SoftwareSoftware
ServersServers
StaffStaff
• Assumptions as in scenario 2, but add:
• Upweight required impressions by 40% to handle one regional center falling over
• Assume $1,200 / month for global load balancing
• Assume one systems administrator utilised 30%-100% paid $96,000 / year
• Assume one technical support operative utilised 30%-100% paid $78,000 / year
• DART Enterprise costs $250k or $9,600 / month over 3 years
33
Total cost of ownership #OXwebinar
Comparing this TCO to OpenX Enterprise
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The monthly cost of self-hosting DART globally scales linearly, and is 165%-37% more expensive than OpenX Enterprise:
33
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The monthly costs of self-hosted ad serving are significantly higher than hosted OpenX Enterprise in all three of our TCO comparisons:
Our benchmark: OpenX Enterprise
A small, regional publisher
11
using
22A medium sized, regional publisherusing
33A large, multi-regional publisherusing
41-255%
46-232%
37-165%
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The self-hosted setups have several limitations which are not highlighted in a straightforward TCO comparison
There are some other key differences between self-hosting and hosted adserving
RedundancyRedundancy
SecuritySecurity
FunctionalityFunctionality
Malware groups use out-dated, unpatched self-hosted ad servers to distribute malware
Self-hosted OpenX Source does not have all of the plugins (e.g. forecasting, advanced analytics) found in OpenX Enterprise
No global load balancing / spare capacity in our first two scenarios – one data center means a single point of failure
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Given the cost comparisons and other qualitative issues, we recommend that publishers use a hosted ad server solution such as OpenX Enterprise
Total cost of ownership #OXwebinar