obligatory preface: we’re 100%-user funded and everything you donate to us specifically goes to the website, or any outside labor we pay to do something for us.
overall expenses this month: $264.50
We downsized this month which has significantly brought down our costs, but it involved quite a few steps so it's a bit complicated to roll everything up. For simplicity purposes I rolled all the snapshots, backups, and hosting together for old/new droplets by service.
$177.46 for Digital Ocean hosting, which can be further subdivided into
- $157.50 for hosting the site itself
- $2.28 for backups
- $17.68 for site snapshots
$29.60 for Hive, an internal chat platform we’ve set up (also being hosted on Digital Ocean)
- $24.00 for hosting Hive
- $4.80 for backups
- $0.80 for snapshots
~$39.16 for email functionality, which can be further subdivided into
- $35/mo for Mailgun (handles outbound emails, so approval/denial/notifications emails; also lets us not get marked as spam)
- ~$4.16/mo ($50/yr, already paid in full) for Fastmail (handles all inbound emails)
$18.28 for BackBlaze (redundant backup system that’s standalone from Digital Ocean)
overall contributions this month: $1,033.82
support still more than covers our expenses, thank you everyone! breakdown is:
- 114 monthly contributions, totaling $793.82
- 12 one-time donations, totaling $240.00 It seems like the majority of our flow has shifted to monthly contributions and we are still sustainable overall
total end of month balance: $4,701.66
expense runway, assuming no further donations
- assuming expenses like ours this month: we have about 17 months and three weeks of runway
awesome. you are really creating something special with your instance and it seems to pay off. how are you paying only $2.28 on digital ocean for backups? did you stop using digital ocean backups?
I think we utilized snapshots to downsize so there were less backups this month
This is sort of correct. Doing file level backups with restic to B2 for needed data files. The system can always bee reinstalled as needed, its the data on it that we need to save; not the whole thing. So 1 snapshot this month for last month of the whole system, a 'known-working-good'. Then did a bunch of updates, configurations, and restorations. Didn't need to roll back, so removed the snapshot.
Backups are still working just not doing it on DigitalOcean side.
In addition, the costs will be lower next month for DO as well. They charge you for the time a VPS is on. This month, the beefy expensive server was on for a 'few weeks' even though it wasn't serving 'beehaw.org'. Just needed to sync some things and files between that one and the new, smaller tier DO. Still charged for the time that expensive one was on. Next month (This one? Sep) won't have that beefy server on it at all. So; should see lower cost.
Thanks for the response I was never in doubt about your backup process. The digital ocean pricing for the backups seemed low to me compared what digital ocean suggest what backups would cost for me.