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
Echoing thetruelinuxdev, I'd be willing to help however I can. I also have a personal server just sitting mostly idle I could try to use for this stuff, but that of course depends on you all as the admins of the instance trusting some random on the internet vs a VPS provider like DO. I do have Linux Sysadmin and other technology experience. Giving money is easier but might not be as impactful as helping with infrastructure, to me.
Thank you! We will definitely take any and all suggestions and offers into consideration 🥰
Just PM for resume 🤣 but seriously, while I know I can't donate as much time as some of you already do, for what I can do, I'd rather support a community effort like this with my labor rather than that other-site.
I’ll throw my hat in here too, I have capacity on my in-home infrastructure and will also be colocating a couple servers in a proper datacentre over the coming months. I back up everything to disks, minimum 2 week on-disk retention, then duplicate it onto tapes (don’t laugh - they’re rated for 30 years cold storage). I keep yearly backups infinitely, monthlys for 1-2 years, weeklys for 6 months iirc. Based in Australia if that helps. 10+ years experience as a sysadmin/cyber sec professional. Feel free to DM if I can help the cause as I’m happy to donate capacity