So long, and thanks for all the FUD.

Support costs are about the same when you involve competent IT and Development staff. In fact, paying for support directly from an Open Source vendor is more akin to ‘getting a license’ and can’t really be compared to “$99″ support calls to Microsoft. But its been my experience that Open Source developers are generally smarter, know how their technologies work at a more intimate level, and are generally better looking then their Point and Click counter parts.

Not a surprising result, given that Apache is often (though not always) used with Linux and MySQL, both of which are free, sort of. The upfront cost for the Linux O/S and MySQL DB are nothing, but the LAMP configuration is not without its drawbacks. In order to get really competent support for either of these systems, you have to purchase expensive time based support contracts from third party resellers (e.g., Red Hat) or the author (MySQL AB).

Admittedly, the .NET / MS SQL configuration involves higher upfront costs due to license fees, but the support can be alot less expensive, especially for reasonably competent developers. A single incident support ticket at MS is only $99, compared with hundreds or even thousands of dollars per year for LAMP support.

The bottom line is that in evaluating cost, you need to look at average annual cost of use, instead of just looking at the first year. I admit I don’t know which platform would win based on this standard, but I’d be willing to guess that the LAMP cost advnatage, if in fact there is one, is alot less than most people think.

http://wordpress.com/.htaccess

It lets them keep their “open-source” street cred

LiteSpeed’s ability to read apache httpd.conf and htaccess files makes it very attractive, beyond it’s incredible performance. Too bad no-one else is bothering to do that kind of compatibility with open-source because they’d get a huge number of adopters.