Not more expensive, more difficult to source. IME - mid level sys admin/eng job code will get 10-20% less compensation than an SDE. A principle level SEs comp will also top out before an SDE.

For junior or mid level SE I've seen about 10% of candidates meet the hiring bar. SDEs I've had less involvement, but I'd hazard 20% get an offer where I've been.

The other problem is the pipeline. Colleges keep Pumping out SDE candidates from comp sci and maths. These junior SDEs will also have a reasonably consistent skill set and experience. There are (effectively) no colleges or curriculum creating new SEs. The incoming candidates also vary widely in their depth and breadth of relevant knowledge. Pretty sure that contributes to the higher negative signal.

Good sysadmins, yes. Keep in mind that the ideal sysadmin is someone who knows the guts of BSD or Linux (typically, not both) inside and out; can troubleshoot the strangest of problems very quickly; is constantly measuring and improving performance; and can hack together shell scripts or Python or even C code as needed.

Linux and BSD are hellaciously complex and prone to very strange behavior once you start taking them into high-performance land.

If you're OK settling with, "can read syslog and look stuff up on the web", those guys are cheap.

Note that this doesn't differentiate colocation and something like EC2 though - both benefit from these kind of good sysadmins.

Hmm. I have to think about that a bit. On the face of it, EC2 and colocation require completely different skill sets, and those skill sets don't overlap very much.

Being a good Linux sysadmin might be fundamentally harder than being a good EC2 sysadmin; I'm not honestly familiar enough with EC2 to know.

I would point out though that Amazon has a vested interest in making EC2 less hard, so I would be surprised if the general opinion was that EC2 administration was just as hard as Linux administration.

EC2 instances are running some OS, whether it's Linux or BSD or Windows or whatever. The only thing that doesn't overlap is hardware tuning and maintenance, and even there you should be using the same tools to figure out if you've got a hardware bottleneck on your EC2 instance as you'd use to evaluate performance on a standalone box.

Being a good EC2 sysadmin involves 100% of being a good linux sysadmin, plus the additional EC2 specific stuff. It is in no way easier at all.

Depends on your business. If your small business is writing code, having a sysadmin around and not 100% busy they are could be costly compared to hiring another programer.

But looking at general rates, I would say no.