I have one client who wants to build and host everything in their domain. They do not have the killer disruptive app or anything but they have a good idea for a service business that is going to keep them in twinkles for a good long time.But if you had the next great idea and you wanted to focus strictly on the components that are considered core to the business and not the periphery. For example; instead of a social component you’d connect to Facebook. Instead of an emailer you’d use mailgun. And for logging maybe something like loggly. Of course there is mongodb, puppet and chef services and so on…When I look at these services the costs seem on the high side per server. And when you combine the costs; they are in the stratosphere. For example; I have a client where I run 4 asterisk servers and 4 admin consoles. I wanted to try newrelic but when I looked at the pricing it was simply too much. The servers were costing 2K/mo for all 8 of them and newrelic was going to cost more than double.Recently the first client I mentioned; has started to change course. There are some things they are now willing to outsource and something that absolutely need to be internally supported. It’s a tough formula but the line is somewhere between profit and overall cost.Back to my original question. If I outsourced and managed everything except my core. What is it going to cost? Is it going to be reliable enough? Will it scale?  How do I get to the next step?But what will it cost?