Meta @aussie.zone Lodion 🇦🇺 @aussie.zone 1y ago

Supporting Aussie.Zone

Hi all.

With the success of the last week it looks like this place will be around for a while longer. To that end, I've created a Ko-fi profile where you can contribute to covering the ongoing costs associated with running Aussie.Zone, if you feel inclined.

There is no pressure to do this right now. Some have asked, and for me if the costs are covered its one less thing to think about. I'm ok covering the current costs associated with the site. However there will come a point I'll need to ask for contributions or shut the site down.

Read on if you're interested in my thoughts on where additional costs will arise for the operation of the site, otherwise.. have a nice day :)

Immediate

Current costs for running Aussie.Zone are:

OVH VPS ~$66 AUD per month
Wasabi object storage for images ~$11 AUD ($5.99 USD per month)
OVH VPS automated backups $11 AUD per month

Medium term

Based on what I've seen so far, I expect the next pain point on the server will be needing either more CPU, or storage for the database. CPU usage is driven by local instance user count, storage more so by volume of posts across the wider fediverse.

Either of these is addressed by the current OVH VPS - "Comfort". RAM and storage can be upgraded independently for different prices.

Longer term...

Domain renewal with Porkbun ~$35 AUD ($24 USD)
Database storage... is going to be the killer of instances. OVH VPSs can be scaled up to 640GB for $160 AUD per month. But at that price we're into dedicated server territory.

Any questions, feel free to ask.

Ledger

This will detail cashflows associated with aussie.zone. Initial costs including domain registration (ends June 8 2024) and 1st month hosting (ends July 8th 2023) paid by me.

June 15 2023: $0 starting figure
June 15 2023: +$150 in donations 🎉
June 17 2023: -$8 enabled OVH VPS backups, pro-rata fee
June 23 2023: +$70 in donations (~$210 balance) 🎉

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32 comments

Not sure if OVH has this but I know with Vultr, DO and some other providers, you could pay for Block Storage that you can mount to your VPS instance, and is significantly cheaper than upgrading the VPS instance itself. Might be worth considering for the DB growth if the CPU doesn't become a bottleneck.
- Yep, OVH have that as an option:
  
  But the included storage can be upgraded (to a limit) within each "family" of VPS that OVH offer. On the current "Essential" VPS family we can double to 160GB of storage for $14pm. Higher families can be upgraded to larger storage volumes.
  
  When 160GB is not enough, I suspect we'll be needing to upgrade to the "Comfort" level for CPU/RAM anyway. At which point we can upgrade storage up to 640GB.
  
  Having said all that, before making any major change to the cost base I'll be sure to post here for discussion and suggestions 🙂
  
  On the topic of storage, we're sitting at ~25% used currently. The rate of growth seems to have settled down after the initial rapid growth:
  
  The daily drop in utilisation at 4am is purging of older cached images. They're re-pulled from Wasabi as required.

32 comments