This evening, I came across a forum thread online, in which users of electronic trading workstations were comparing Puget Systems to other PC builders (mainly bargain basement PC builders). An owner of one of our PC's posted the following:
"I paid a $600 premium for my last computer from Puget. Since I typically keep a computer for about three years, I'm paying about 55 cents a day extra to have super reliable trading machines backed up by great customer service. For me, it's worth it because computer problems mean time away from trading and/or time away from my wife and kids. Everybody has to make his own price/value decision."
I love the thought process!
Now, we shouldn't be $600 more than even the most bargain of competitors when compared apples to apples, but that's not my point. No matter the premium, with a simple home PC for internet and email, there might not be hard costs associated with downtime. But for professional workstations and servers, the cost of downtime can very quickly eclipse the original cost of the PC. Even if you have redundancy that keep your operation afloat, you still have time and money to devote to solving any PC issues you encounter.
I've talked before and we've posted hard facts about the wide variation in component reliability alone. Add to that our exhaustive quality control, our thermal imaging able to predict failures before symptoms occur, and our 100% USA-based lifetime technical support, and you have the makings of a PC that is on an entirely different level of reliability.
What is that time worth to you?