If I were to do some rough math I’d say it would cost about $300/CAD per month.
My goal is once we are approved to start accepting donations that I can purchase dedicated hardware for this instance. I’d get a used server at about $2300 which would be sufficient a good amount of extra users and through it into its own dedicated shared colo at about $100/month. Factor in about $300-400 a year for drive replacements and we are left with $2300 / 12 month= 191.66 + 100/month for the shared 1u colo + a budget of $400 for drive failures throughout the year $33/month. 191.66 + 100 + 33 = $324.66/month for the first year dropping to about $133 per month after the first 12 months. It’s worth noting that this method would give us double the amount of resources and quite a bit of extra storage.
Ideally we don’t keep this instance on a single server forever and start to think about spreading it over multiple hosts at or after around 100K users (or less if the number of active users is high).
If someone wanted to host an instance they would not need to allocate as much resources as I have to this instance and depending on how active the instance gets could run off something a lot less powerful.
I really appreciate the information, it’s very interesting to me. Given that you have a fairly specific price in mind for a server, what kind of hardware are you thinking of?
Something with Dual CPUs, at least 128GB ram, dual 750W PSUs, hardware raid (12Gbps) and 8 x 2.5" SAS/SATA slots for SSD Drives on a raid 10
Ddr4 or 5? I might have 128gb of rdimm ddr4 I’m never going to use sitting on my desk.
This sounds exactly like the poweredge r530 I have in my homelab. Managed to snag it on eBay with those specs, minus drives, for $350.
I love the transparency. I think we can easily reach that mark. Whenever you get approved for donations we’ll be ready. I’ve got at least tree fiddy in my account
Have you considered the implications of hardware failure on uptime? And where the cost to maintain a physical hardware will come from? What about scaling requirements?
I’m not a network engineer, but I’ve been involved in the corporate argument of Cloud vs On-Prem. hosting for years now. The costs always come out better for Cloud when factoring in other indirect costs like facilities and labor.
Granted it’s always been on the scale of hundreds of millions to billions of dollars, and I haven’t run the numbers on smaller requirements. I just wouldn’t want to expose additional points of failure in return for slightly lower monthly costs.
I think the cost always come out better for cloud for a given reliability level. But this is a volunteer run thing, so we won’t mind if there is some more important downtime than on reddit or Twitter. I really do think that if your objective is not reaching 100% uptime but cost reduction, then on prem really becomes the cheapest option
A very good point! We don’t need constant uptime. But I worry about the hidden costs of On-Prem, and worst case scenario where TheDude is on vacation somewhere and the instance crashes, it could be down for a while. It’s also not a worry I would want to force on them either.
