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 ๐
June 17 2023: -$8 enabled OVH VPS backups, pro-rata fee
June 23 2023: +$70 in donations (~$210 balance) ๐
Total DB size is currently ~3GB. However it doesn't grow linearly. It grows, then shrinks occasionally with maintenance tasks. But yes, I'd expect we've got a lot of growth left with the scaling I've noted above.
Thanks for the detals on how the underlying infrastructure works.
That's pretty small DB size for now. I'll be interested to see how it grows with time. Can you post monthly/quarterly updates on these sort of stats to satisfy my nerdery :)
One big space saver would be keeping md5 hashes of all images uploaded in posts. Does the lemmy codebase accomodate for the same image being uploaded twice and just keep one copy? That would be a HUGE space saver for repeatedly posted meme images. (Edit: I just asked ChatGPT and it claims this feature doesn't exist yet)
Edit: Follow up question. If I subscribed on aussie.zone to a community called highresspacepics (fictional) on another instance does that mean your instance pulls down all the images from said community or do those images remain on the original instance?
Images aren't stored in the DB, they're stored on the filesystem. In our case that is a cached object store with Wasabi. For us, image storage volume isn't a huge concern. It is growing, but the space on the server itself is manageable.
Subscribing to a remote community on Aussie.Zone results in posts, comments, votes etc being synced and stored in the DB. Images remain on the home instance. This is where I see Lemmy hitting scaling issues... as instance servers may be hugged to death if they host a post/comment that goes viral.
edit: and yeah, happy to post nerdy stuff. Will do so sporadically.