It depends who's asking!
OK, that sounds like a dubious answer. So let me be clear from the outset: our pricing is transparent and our perpetual licensing model is fair and straightforward. We don’t believe in locking you in.
“The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” - Henry David Thoreau
When we talk about cost, what do we really mean?
If you are in charge of your organisation's budget, you want to know both the upfront capex and the long term expense (TCO).
If you are the person who implements, manages and maintains the product, what you really want to know is - how much of a headache is it going to be?
So what is the “real" cost?
When choosing a load balancer, it's important to look at the following requirements:
- Does it do exactly what I want?
- Is it straightforward to install, configure and maintain?
- What is the standard of support (not only the SLA, but the quality of the responses)?
- What are the performance and feature restrictions of the licence?
- What does it cost to add more applications to the load balancer?
- Do they have customers like us (and what do they say)?
- What happens if it blows up?
- Can I change my mind?
- What is the contract lock-in, and does it auto-renew?
- Can I keep the perpetual licence if I stop paying for support?
By covering all the eventualities upfront, you can make an informed choice based not only on budget but on the reassurance that your decision won’t come back to bite you within 6 months.
Opportunity cost
Someone will undoubtedly ask “do we need this?”
In other words, do you need an application that never breaks, has the ability to scale and is easy to maintain?
I will let you argue that with the bean counters. But the answer is almost always “can we afford not to?”
You could rightly challenge this with open source products like HAProxy (we love it so much, we use it in our products). We always advocate taking this route if there are budget constraints - but if not, you could choose to have a commercially supported product.
Customer-driven product development
A common complaint with some ADCs is the complexity of configuration.
In order to keep things simple, we listen to the customer feedback loop through support cases and surveys, and add features that make sense.
Our aim is always to deliver the features you want, without presenting you with a deluge of checkboxes. Anything out of the ordinary can be achieved via a separate manual configuration - and we are always happy to build one for you.
The Loadbalancer.org way
Our goal is to achieve the best not only in terms of price, but of “real" cost.
We believe in making it easy to deploy highly available, scalable applications.
Our appliances are deliberately simple yet highly configurable and backed by our first class support.
We always encourage prospective customers and partners to test drive the appliance and support by downloading our free trial.