Site funding

I wonder how well this site is funded. I know from firsthand experience that running a SQL server and a web server combined is not cheap.

How many people actually do become Patrons and everything? I can't imagine too many, even with the annoying "become a Patron" badge on the front page.

Drench your car in milk for me xo

The Patreon page shows the cost, or at least I thought it did, I'm not completely sure

Justice will prevail and all that stuff, right?

You're right. As of 27 Nov 2020, it's $22 per month

Drench your car in milk for me xo

That's the cost? Or the funding?

Justice will prevail and all that stuff, right?

How much Hull is being paid; the funding.

Compared to the $100 a month he states as the price to keep everything running, that's... pitiful.

Drench your car in milk for me xo

The hosting costs come to around $135/month for all of the HullBreach Studios websites, including Web server, database, email, domain names. Of those costs, royalties from Wii U game sales still cover about half that cost. Patron covers about a third of the remaining expenses, and a few generous donations have fully covered a few months of hosting costs.

In the longer term, the monthly drain of funds does hold back further investments into hardware and software to expand revenue, so I have been trying to keep active with other projects to cover the costs -- which is why updates have been sparse in the Community for a while. I would prefer to not have ads in the Community, aside from links to Patreon and HullBreach Studios apps and games that all show on the homepage. The reason for this is that ads tend to be intrusive and memory-intensive for mobile devices, plus they rely on datemining and tracking every detail about users across different websites to maximize revenue. (Google Analytics does run in the community to determine traffic numbers and the most common devices, but that is the limit of datamining used by this Community.)

I'm predestined to have free will.

That's... not cheap to sustain a side project like this. I thought that running a website was not cheap, but holy. Might be partly because of the domain name; I know that's not cheap.
This kinda does seem like a call for help.

If push comes to shove, though, I might just recode this all in Java and slap it on a free hosting site.
With a gnarly URL tho. Not pretty by any means of the imagination.

Drench your car in milk for me xo

Domain names are actually the cheap bit. About $8 per year per .com domain. Hosting is where it gets expensive

Limitations fuel creativity

The distinguished Robdeprop spake:

Domain names are actually the cheap bit. About $8 per year per .com domain. Hosting is where it gets expensive

Really, I thought it was ~$40 a month for a domain name.

But if hosting is the primary issue, then free hosting services can take care of most of the issues. Problem is data security, and idk about that one

Drench your car in milk for me xo

Due to the storage requirements of tens of thousands of paintings and all the content in the DB, I can't use a free host or even a cheap one like FastDomain or BlueHost. Plus, @SavantInamorata 's website and several other websites are on the same virtual server, sharing space that would never fit onto a cheap host. The actual server costs come to well over $200/month, but the other family members' websites are self-sufficient with their costs.

I'm predestined to have free will.

I forget that there exists a big storage requirement with this site... darn.
I dunno how big the databases with Heroku get, so that's worth investigating. Maybe it just gets more costlyas it expands, who knows.

Drench your car in milk for me xo

That's a lot of money, wow (I might donate to the patreon sometime, if that can help) :]

Keep me up 'till 4am, I'll stay up for you :)

I'm not 100% familiar with the development stack of this website, but I did a back-of-the-envelope estimation on the cost to rehost everything onto AWS. It came out as around USD$70 every month.

However, the estimation of the amount of data on this site might be off by an order of magnitude, which would make the costs double or triple.



I could also cut costs by eliminating old data that will never realistically be accessed again, but then it'd lose the appeal for people to return to check up on the site every once in a while.

Drench your car in milk for me xo

Nvm, I could just use Lightsail and just hope that Spring Boot is faster than PHP

Which, to be fair, is likely true

Also, cuts down on costs by ~$10 a month

Drench your car in milk for me xo