the UPDATED financials of Beehaw as of June 2023 (and how you can help our website stay up and be more reliable)
the UPDATED financials of Beehaw as of June 2023 (and how you can help our website stay up and be more reliable)
hey folks, here's another meta-post. this one isn't specifically in response to the massive surge of users, but the surge is fortuitously timed because i've been intending to give a good idea of what our financial stability is like. as a reminder, we're 100%-user funded. everything you donate to us specifically goes to the website, or any outside labor we pay to do something for us.
thanks to your generous support, we're pretty confident we have passed our current break-even point for this month, at which we wouldn't eventually need to pay out of our own pockets to keep the site running. that point in our estimation is about $26 a month or $312 a year. (please ignore OC's estimated yearly budget--we don't determine it lol)
our expenses are currently:
- $18/mo toward our host, Digital Ocean. (yesterday we upgraded from DO's $12 tier to its $18 tier to mitigate traffic issues and lag, and it's really worked out!)
- $2/mo for weekly backups
- $4/mo for daily snapshots of the website, which would allow us to restore the website in between the weekly backups if need be.
for a total of at least $26/mo in expenses. this may vary from month to month though, so we're baking in a bit of uncertainty with our estimation.
we currently have, for the month of June:
- $70/mo in recurring donations (at least for June)
- $200 this month in one-time donations
for a total of $270 this month. our total balance now stands at $331.31.
that balance means we now have about a year months of reserves currently, if we received no other donations and have no unexpected expenses.[^1] the recurring donations put us well into the green at this point.
this is good! everything past our break-even point each month is, to be clear, money we can save and put toward scaling up our infrastructure. there is no downside to donating after we've already met our "goal" of basic financial stability. doing so will have pretty straightforward practical implications for you: fewer 500s, 503s, better image support (this takes a lot of space!), and the website generally being run on more than potato hardware.[^2] if you'd like to do so in light of this information, our OpenCollective page is this post's link. thanks folks!
[^1]: we will have at least one upcoming expense but its size is TBD, and so is how we'll pay for it [^2]: especially during times like now, where we've likely been getting thousands or tens of thousands of hits an hour
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Scaling up can become quickly cost-prohibitive with large-scale servers. I've noted that the most affordable option with Digital Ocean, at $12/month, offers only a basic droplet with 1 vCPU, 2GB of RAM, and 50GB of SSD storage. When you consider a higher-end configuration with 16GB of RAM, 8 vCPUs, and 320GB of SSD storage at $96/month, it may not seem economical, especially as storage and backup needs increase with server scaling.
As an alternative approach to minimize costs while scaling, consider purchasing used servers from platforms like eBay and setting up a small-scale hosting operation in your garage. While this route does introduce overheads like business internet services and electricity costs, along with regular maintenance such as HDD replacements, it could be more cost-effective in the long run.
For instance, you could acquire a server on eBay for about $300, offering 20 CPU cores, 64GB of RAM, and 8TB of SAS HDD storage. Comparatively, a similar setup on Digital Ocean would cost around $544/month or $6528/year, making the used server a strong competitor against cloud services.
Just some food for thought if you're contemplating scaling in the future.
While I'd be more than happy to purchase and use actual server space for doing this kind of thing, I'm not nearly tech saavy enough to actually run that. I would also worry about bandwidth considerations and other issues. Perhaps there are people willing to contribute to the cause to find affordable ways to run a website like this, but being accessible by multiple people to do things like power cycle the server, not being concerned about our personal IPs being attacked, and having access to support I think is worth the extra cost.
There is a point at which something akin to this needs to be done for financial reasons, but I think we're pretty far from that being a reality and while it relies on slightly more donations from our lovely userbase, even at $96/mo that's not that much money to collect when we have the thousands of users that would require that kind of hardware.
I appreciate your thoughtful response to my comment. There are indeed several strategies that can be employed to decrease bandwidth and storage costs. Leveraging a Content Delivery Network, such as the free service provided by Cloudflare, can help mitigate these costs by caching your webpages and images. As for the cost of internet service, it greatly varies based on your location. If you're located closer to the internet backbone, the likelihood of finding a more reasonably priced business internet plan increases.
While it may seem premature at this stage, I firmly believe in the success of this website, even in the face of numerous failures in this space.
- Edited to add -
You've correctly highlighted the potential threat of attacks on your server. Cloudflare is known for its prowess in mitigating substantial distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and could be an excellent security asset in this context.
Regarding the value of professional support, I acknowledge that the cost can often be justified. My suggestions are merely alternatives, providing you with additional options should you require them.
Using cloudflare as proxy would essentially mean letting them MITM all the traffic though right? All things considered they're one of the trustworthy companies but is there some other alternative that you can basically self host?
Cloudflare can't be accurately labeled as a Man-in-the-Middle (MitM), given its integral role in the service stack. The same logic would falsely accuse platforms like Linode, AWS, and Azure of the same. Moreover, self-hosting is entirely feasible. The main challenge arises from Internet Service Providers, which often restrict upload speeds unjustifiably. I highlight this to explain why it typically becomes more economical to locate closer to the internet backbone, where the cost and the plan tend to be more reasonable.
Hey person :) I didn't accuse anyone of anything. Just pointing out that if you use clouddlare as a proxy specifically, they are technically decrypting your traffic? AWS/Azure/Linode are primarily hosts for webapps and VPSs not proxy providers as far as I'm aware.
It's more apt to say that when you observe what it offers and what it needs, you're basically coming to a decision that you could choose to forgo some of the security by giving them the TLS cert in exchange for CDN to alleviate server load as well as preventing DDOS attacks. And Linode does allows proxy to be run on their infrastructure when I last contacted them, so they are somewhat a proxy provider although not directly.
And I didn't mean to say you're accusing those providers, but only pointing out that when you voluntarily give the providers your configuration/certificate, there isn't any malice in this case for it to be attributed to Man in the Middle attack, and there were consent involved.
I agree that you could host your own proxy on any provider if you wanted to which is nice :)
My problem with Cloudflare is that they aren't that transparent about what they're doing.
What I've usually seen is this: people switch to cloudflare DNS because frankly it's one of the best services available. They see the little cloud next to their A records which says it uses proxy to make your websites load faster and think this is great. At no point there is a warning saying that by clicking this you're essentially letting us manage TLS on your website.
I do use cloudflare proxy because it is pretty neat but definitely not on all content I use.
I also have to say my concern is not that cloudflare is going to read my passwords or info in my databases but that a) I wouldn't like to put all eggs in one basket and b) dedicated state actors like NSA might have access into cloudflare.