Welcome to this months financial report.

Everything is still ticking along nicely, so I’ll make this short and sweet. If there’s something else you want to know about all this then feel free to ask in the comments.

As can be seen from our graph on Open Collective we got £43.76 in and spent £49.99:

However, that’s not the complete picture - the various outgoings are listed in the spreadsheet but to break it down further:

Hosting remains unchanged (total after VAT €40.68 - £34.74):

  • Server - €29.00
  • IP4 - €1.70
  • Backup box - €3.20

In addition I’ve been reimbursed £10.57 for earlier hosting payments. This is the penultimate one of these. So, after next month the contributions will cover the outgoings.

Since Tom handed over the instance, we’ve largely been focused on ensuring the site is working properly and that the bills get paid. This is now all working smoothly and, as a thank you for sticking with us and generously supporting the instance, we’ve been working on a few things. First up, we’ve added new frontends. We’re looking into other changes and hope to also add some perks for contributors too. With the latter in mind, I will be working through everyone who has donated and linking them to their feddit.uk usernames. If your’s isn’t obvious then contact me either here or on Matrix (the secure message button in my profile).

Previous reports:

  • BeardedGingerWonder@feddit.ukEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    Nice one! As I’m a saddo, it would be really interesting to see what kind of spec the hardware backing the instance is and the kind of load that gets on it, even ballpark would be good (obviously if you have time at some point and it’s not a ton of hassle!)

    • GreatAlbatross@feddit.ukMEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      I have been tagged, after promising Emperor that I’d answer this several days ago 😅

      Simple terms: 4 cores, 8 threads, 64GB RAM, >500GB storage.
      At the moment, we use about 1/4 of that.
      Which is great, because when things do spike, there is headroom before things slow down.

      The reason we’re over-specced, is that the our current dedicated box costs the same as a “correctly” sized non-shared cloud instance. So for the sake of a couple of euros a month, we also doubled the ram.

      • BeardedGingerWonder@feddit.ukEnglish
        0·
        3 months ago

        Thank you! I’ve harboured notions of building out a web app for a while and been curious about the nitty gritty of server specs vs pricing for large scale projects like this (personal experience is with bare metal for a big corp and internally billed, so basically made up), this is brilliant info that’ll help ballpark performance if I ever get round to it.

        I’m low key impressed how little hardware this all takes tbh, we’re apparently a top 100 instance and it’s running on what amounts to a workstation. Good plan with the overspeccing, for the price the resiliency is totally worth it!

        Thank you both for running a fantastic instance.

        • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝@feddit.ukOPEnglish
          0·
          3 months ago

          I’m low key impressed how little hardware this all takes tbh

          It’s one of the reasons I wanted to lay all the information out. I want to encourage more subject-specific instances and so demonstrating that it is cheap to run (which makes fundraising doable) could help convince a few people to give it a go. If it helps others with their projects then that’s a lovely bonus too.

          Good plan with the overspeccing, for the price the resiliency is totally worth it!

          It has definitely helped when activity spikes - if we were on the bare bones required, we’d have had issues with uptime. It also means we can put off upgrading for a while - migrating from the old hosting took days. It should be easier moving within the same hosting company but it is still a chore.

    • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝@feddit.ukOPEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      @[email protected] is going to tag in on this and give you a better answer than I can.

      Generally though we went for higher specs than we needed to give ourselves plenty of breathing room so we wouldn’t have to upgrade soon and it gives us enough spare capacity that we can cope with any excessive demands on our resources (so we should, hopefully, weather the next Rexxit, for example).

    • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝@feddit.ukOPEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      Rhetorically speaking, I’ve no idea what an ID is, nor do I know what a front end is.

      That’s fine as your username here and on Open Collective are the same, so you are already accounted for. I may change “ID” to “username” for clarity.

      On the frontends - Lemmy’s user interface is separate from what makes the magic happen behind the scene, so people can create new interfaces, like Photon. We’ve added three popular ones if people are interested but if you use an app or are happy to continue using the web interface, then feel free to just ignore this.