I don’t even understand what I’ve written in the title, so I’m guessing you might need more information than I currently have, but is there any sort of ball-park figure for a virtual server?
Our business is in London. The vendor is based in the US.

Depends on what sort of server,the specification, how many cpus, how much ram etc, hosting and licencing for software, maintenence plans for having the provider patch it… too much of an open ended question.

https://www.rackspace.com/en-gb/managed-hosting

Sounds like you are about to buy something you don’t understand, this will not end well.

What do you plan to do with the server?

sounds like you have been asked to sign off on something you don’t understand. As above, what is happening

£71.53 per month for a single core, 3.5GB of RAM, 50GB disk running Windows Server in Northern Europe region (Dublin/Amsterdam). 24 hours per day.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/pricing/calculator/

But as others have said, it varies hugely. It’s a bit like asking “what’s the cost of a house”.

Well, no I’m not going to buy it and the eventual purchase of this will go through our procurement department so will be researched thoroughly by someone who knows what they’re doing (ie not me) before any decision is made.

What I’m doing is trying to get ballpark costs for my boss for two rival systems. They are pieces of software which we are licensing. The costs include all software, training and maintenance for the product but one of them says we will likely need a virtual server in our office in London.
So I was wondering if this cost was something likely to tip the balance in favour of one. Is the cost likely to be an annual fee rather than a one-off cost?

Easy then, ask the software vendor what spec of VM they would recommend and cost that.

Of course the are a large number of other factors as mattyfez states, but that will get you though this phase.

Just spoken to the vendor and he estimated 8000 US dollars one-off cost for 2 Virtual Servers in case one is required for fallover/disaster/load balancing. Said this was a safe number (ie on the high side).

Thanks all.

Who currently manages your IT? Where are the servers you currently run stuff on? In your office? Hosted in a data centre? Public cloud?

I’d ask your IT guy – if you already have spare capacity on existing servers and are already virtualised, the incremental cost could be close to zero.

Virtual servers are “software” servers that run inside real servers. One real server could host lots of virtual ones. Because they are just software, they are very easy to create and destroy.

On a big public service like Azure (others are available) you can create your own virtual server in a few minutes and pay as you go by credit card.

What are you getting for your £8k? Two VM images + software licences? Do you need to add hardware / host os / hypervisor /backup solution ? Sounds like it…

Azure is perfect for this, not only can you get the server’s up and running fast, but you can set the two of them to be in different availability sets then just throw an load balancer appliance in front for a few quid a month.

Get a better idea of the spec and use the pricing calculator posted above

Not been funny, but I’d hand over the entire question to someone who actually knows what they are doing.

Have you fully costed the implementation, integration, support&maintenance and then any exit costs along with the infrastructure (including any o/s, middlewear etc). Also the infrastructure configuration can have an impact on the software, o/s and middlewear costs (including S&M).

And what data is going through it, any data protection issues (now or in May 2018)?