Excerpt from The Art of Scalability Chapter 27,  Too Much Data

1. Storage costs to store data
2. People and software to manage data
3. Power and space to make storage work
4. Capital to ensure the proper power infrastructure
5. Processing power to traverse the data
6. Backup time and costs

Some quite interesting stats of the cost of monetization with the ratio of scaling in different platforms.

But I’m not so sure, why it includes web servers (Nginx, Apache), languages (PHP) and web frameworks (Rails, Django, Mochiweb, Jetty) as a single group, doesn’t make sense.

http://journal.dedasys.com/2010/01/12/rough-estimates-of-the-dollar-cost-of-scaling-web-platforms-part-i