Our IT department isn't exactly enthusiastic about us trying this out on one of their servers and are talking maintenance and disk replacement costs if we want to try it out. (They will get back to me on exactly how much later...)  It seems to us that if they are talking about charging us, we should compare prices for hosting a drupal server else ware (We have a ghost/deepfreeze server windows 2003 but that's all). Either a server we buy or hosted offsite.  However, I don't know where to start.

I know we can put this open source software on a PC...and we've done that but this isn't a solution for a production level web service  

What is the average cost of hosting a drupal server out there in the cloud?  Are there things we should know?  Would you recommend anyone that does this for libraries?

Jill

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