AusFinance

I wonder what the difference in costs are for the privately owned distribution in Victoria versus the government owned distribution in QLD or NT. Is the cost higher for the data centres in publicly owned or privately owned areas?

I have a hard time taking this seriously. Data centers are far more power efficient than what we had previously (every medium sized business having a server room). And servers in general are far more power efficient than they were even a decade ago. We can fit so much more on a single server than we ever used to be able to.

Not that you would do it in 2024, but I could happily run a large business of 1,000+ users, including their public web presence out of about 10RU. Which translates to roughly a quarter of a server rack.

But why would you do that? Then you need to worry about cooling, power, redundant power, multiple Internet links, UPS and generator backup. Suddenly 10RU is a whole rack and more. Now, you need hardware contracts, people on call 24x7 and all sorts of overheads. Then there's stress testing on that infrastructure (eg simulating a power outage and making sure your UPS and generator carry the load). And I haven't even touched on multiple sites for redundancy.

It's far more efficient to host that in a data centre and let them worry about all that stuff.