It's considerably more than $270 if you're using your own hardware. Consider bandwidth and energy costs.
I do wish the article gave more attention to VPS providers like AWS or Rackspace, but I don't see how anything in the article could discourage someone from administering their own server (that is, of the set of people who aren't already put off by scary command lines). 90% of the article is relevant to someone with a VPS.
FWIW, my current costs for a single dev server at Rackspace (initially Slicehost) are about $12-$20/month ($240 max for a year), which probably costs less than the electricity my current computer is using.
I do wish the article gave more attention to VPS providers like AWS or Rackspace, but I don't see how anything in the article could discourage someone from administering their own server (that is, of the set of people who aren't already put off by scary command lines). 90% of the article is relevant to someone with a VPS.
FWIW, my current costs for a single dev server at Rackspace (initially Slicehost) are about $12-$20/month ($240 max for a year), which probably costs less than the electricity my current computer is using.