This paper analyzes how the ecological costs impact the total cost of ownership (TCO) of four very different servers, especially by including theoretical a carbon taxes. We assume these servers to process requests of the same type throughout their lifetime. By relating the TCO to the total number of request processes, we obtain a total cost per request (CTpR). We show that a carbon tax has a marginal effect on the CTpR when considering powerful, recent machines, whereas it can account for more than half of the costs for older or lower capacity ‘frugal’ equipment. However, our findings show that such ‘frugal’ machines are more advantageous than higher-capacity servers when considering their environmental big picture.
