Hello all!

After our first few months of operation, I can now confidently put a number on the time and monetary costs of running this site.

First off, right now tucson.social is entirely funded, operated, and moderated by one person - me. I'd like to expand that team to include more people who can volunteer some time. I won't be asking for donations unless the hosting/time costs are too great - but as it stands, this is affordable for me.

Okay, so let's break down the costs into a few categories:

1. Setup expense in man hours
2. Domain expenses
3. OCI infrastructure expenses
4. Cloudflare Infrastructure expenses
5. Maintenance expense in man hours
6. Moderation expense in man hours
7. Miscellaneous expenses

1 - Setup expenses in man hours

The first week was about 30 hours of getting everything working how I wanted. A more simple configuration could've been had much faster, but I wanted a bit more security than that provides.

The second week of working out all the kinks between cloudflare and my origin server was another 16 hours or so.

Total, about 46-50 hours I guess?

2 - Domain expenses

• tucson.social costs 110 USD/yr
• tucson.chat (yet to be launched) costs around 40 USD/yr

These costs will be incurred again sooner rather than later since I'll be transferring my domains to porkbun instead of letting Google transfer them to Squarespace.

For this year, TOTAL: $300

For other years (hopefully) TOTAL: $150

3 - OCI Infrastructure costs

Early on, I used block volumes to back the image storage - this was expensive and wasn't worth the performance benefits due to CDN caching at the edge. I eventually converted to object storage.

The compute instance's size is about "medium-ish" and the burst settings are a bit aggressive to claw back some savings. So far this is more than sufficient for our needs, and we haven't run into any notable performance issues.

Before the conversion, the infrastructure had a price tag of $55 USD/mo (assuming 30 days)

After the conversion, the infrastructure is a much more reasonable total of $35 USD/mo.

4 - Cloudflare infrastructure costs

• $25 USD/mo for the Pro Subscription
• $5 USD/mo to enable Argo routing
• roughly 100GB of data transfer for $10 USD/mo

Totaling $40 USD a month, give or take.

5 - Maintenance expense in man hours

Very low. Sometimes I do muck something up during an update, but I typically only spend about 8 hours a month maintaining the actual server infrastructure. Another 8 hours are spent looking over cloudflare to mitigate any DDOS attacks. So yeah, 16 hours a month maybe.

6 - Moderation expense in man hours

Almost none, maybe 4 hours a month total, most spent removing duplicate newsbot posts. The smaller instance doesn't require much, if any, moderation at the moment.

7 - Miscellaneous expenses and totals

There have likely been a few small fees that I've forgotten about, but likely not exceeding a $20 dollars or so.

Projected average monthly spend:

$85-$90*

* - yearly costs averaged in

Average yearly spend:

$1020-$1080

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On wanting moderators at this time.

My desire for moderators at this point has less to do with actual work to do, and more to do with not only having myself to talk over moderation decisions with. It's difficult figuring out what people want, and another moderator (or few) could be an important balance to my moderation style.