Updated: July 13, 2020 (August 28, 2000)
Charts & IllustrationsASP Licensing Terms
ASPs can license Microsoft software for monthly rental on a per-user basis for each customer who accesses a given application, or they can pay Microsoft on a per-CPU basis, permitting any number of users to access an application running on a particular machine.
The advantage of the per-user license is that a user can access his or her application on any number of servers, from any number of devices. In addition, the ASPs up-front costs are much lower, since they may start with only a few users per CPU. As a rule of thumb, based on unofficial price lists (Microsoft has not publicly released ASP licensing dollar amounts, but Computer Reseller News has published a list), it appears that per-CPU pricing becomes cheaper when each CPU handles approximately 100 users. That may not be economical if the CPU is hosting a CPU-intensive application like SQL Server, in which one CPU would be hard-pressed to serve more than a couple dozen users. In a scenario in which an ASP offers Web hosting with numerous Web sites per CPU, and only occasional updates to the Web content, per-CPU pricing can be economical.
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