small business

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A stack of five closed, plain dark laptops on an office desk at dusk, an empty chair and a city window behind them

Windows 10 ESU Year 2 for Business: $122 a PC, or $183 if You Skipped Year 1

Year 1 of paid Windows 10 security updates ends on October 13, 2026. Year 2 doubles the price, a PC that skipped Year 1 pays for both, and Year 3 doubles again. Here is the bill for 10, 25 and 50 PCs, how to buy and activate it, and when a Windows 11 upgrade or new PC is the cheaper move.

Cipher · 1d ago · 10 min

A small grey steel lockbox with a brass padlock on its latch beside a plain external hard drive on a wooden workbench in late golden light

Cloud & IT

Immutable Backup for a Small Business: What the 3-2-1-1-0 Rule Costs at 1 TB, 10 TB and 50 TB

A locked copy that ransomware cannot delete is the cheap part of a modern backup plan, unless you pick the wrong storage. Monthly bills for Backblaze B2, Wasabi, AWS S3, Cloudflare R2 and Hetzner at three sizes, with the minimum-storage and restore charges that change the answer. Prices read from each vendor on 3 October 2026.

0xLax · 4d ago · 14 min

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Cloud & IT

Why Is My AWS Bill So High? The Line Items That Blow Up Small-Company Cloud Costs (NAT, Egress, Idle GPUs)

Most of a surprise AWS bill is not the servers you picked. It is the NAT gateway, the traffic, the logs and the forgotten disks around them. Every price here comes from AWS's own price files, read on 3 October 2026, with the Cost Explorer view that finds each one.

0xLax · 4d ago · 17 min

Three identical black compact servers side by side on a wooden shelf, two with green status lights and the middle one with a yellow light

Cloud & IT

VMware to Proxmox After Broadcom: The Real 3-Year Cost for a 3-Host Small Business

Broadcom publishes no per-core price, so nobody can hand you a VMware total. We can price the Proxmox side to the dollar, count the 96 cores you would license on VMware, and show the one per-core quote that makes the two equal.

0xLax · 4d ago · 11 min

Hand-drawn illustration of a paper boat full of envelopes riding dark waves at night, with a blue and white lifebuoy tied to its side by a rope

Cloud & IT

Microsoft 365 Backup Pricing 2026: Veeam vs Acronis vs Datto vs Keepit, per User

Microsoft keeps your files running, not your history. Its own backup costs $0.15 per GB a month, Veeam's online store charges $3.50 a user, Afi $3, IDrive $1.67, and Keepit, Datto and Acronis publish no price at all. Every option priced for 10, 25 and 50 users, from the vendors' own pages.

0xLax · 4d ago · 11 min

An old beige tower server on the carpet beside an office desk in late afternoon light, with a paper wall calendar pinned on the wall above it

Cloud & IT

Windows Server 2016 End of Support (Jan 12, 2027): Upgrade, ESU or Move? What Each Path Costs

Windows Server 2016 stops getting free security fixes on January 12, 2027. Three years of extended updates cost $2,999 per 16-core Standard host, a new Windows Server 2025 license costs $1,176, and Azure gives the updates away if you move. Here is every path priced for 1, 2 and 4 servers, from Microsoft's own pages.

0xLax · 4d ago · 12 min

Hand-drawn illustration of a small desktop tower PC with a blue luggage tag standing in front of a towering wall of identical data center server racks

Cloud & IT

Colocation for a Small AI Server: What a 1–4 GPU Box Costs to Host (per kW, 2026)

The $50 single-server colo deals include a fraction of the power a GPU box needs. What hosting a 1, 2 or 4 GPU machine really costs a month, per kilowatt, from providers' own price pages, and when an office closet or a rented GPU beats it.

0xLax · Sep 27 · 11 min

A small office after hours, with a network rack glowing in a corner closet and an open technician's toolbox under a desk lamp

Cloud & IT

Managed IT Services Pricing 2026: What 10-, 25- and 50-Person Companies Pay (US vs EU)

A US company with 25 staff pays a managed IT provider about $3,125–5,000 a month, before onboarding and projects. The monthly bill at 10, 25 and 50 people, what the base fee leaves out, and when one in-house hire or a co-managed setup costs less. Every price comes from providers' own pages, and we say so.

0xLax · Sep 27 · 11 min

Hand-drawn illustration of a small office with a warm GPU tower under a desk and a cloud with a price tag outside the window

Cloud & IT

Cloud GPU vs Your Own AI Server: The 3-Year Cost for a Small Company (Calculator)

Should a 10–50 person company buy a GPU server, rent one by the hour, or just pay per token? The three-year bill for each, from live rental prices, today's hardware prices and government power statistics. The answer for most small companies is not the one GPU vendors sell.

0xLax · Sep 27 · 13 min