Why not use the Standard Edition for web hosting? Anybody?

Okay, here's the scenario. We currently are hosting hundreds of customer websites using our customer service product, and these sites are using MySQL as the backend database. I've finally convinced damagement (thank you, Steve Orr) that we need to migrate these customers to Oracle to start taking advantage of Oracle's slightly more robust and reliable platform. Damagement is especially amenable to this idea since I've had a lot of success migrating our larger customers from MySQL to Oracle at one of our leased sites. These customers have seen a big increase in reliablility and performance now that they're on Oracle.

However, damagement is balking at the ridiculous price Oracle demands for the Enterprise Edition. So, I'm about to propose we go with the Standard Edition instead. I'm aware of the various bells and whistles that don't come with the Standard Edition, but they are things we don't really need. I can't really see anything the Enterprise Edition brings to the table that would be essential for running our web sites.

So, before I lead everyone here down the primrose path, is anyone out there using the Standard Edition for web hosting? Any caveats? We're in the process of ordering the hardware we're going to use -- EMC, Sun stuff, etc.
-- and we'd like to use Oracle from the get-go if possible. But that
possibility only exists if we go with the Standard Edition, which is about a tenth the cost of the Enterprise Edition.

Any comments, suggestions, snide remarks from the peanut gallery?

Thanks,
--Walt Weaver

  Bozeman, Montana, USA Received on Mon Oct 30 2000 - 15:54:22 CST