FA is online but dragging. It's been refusing connections and throwing 503 errors since the relaunch, 24 hours and it hasn't settled yet. For educational purposes let's see what that $18K might have been better spent on, for example Amazon Web Services.
This hosting is apparently used by Microsoft, Linden Labs, and most importantly for our comparison, Furry Art Pile.
The basic technical stuff, first. AWS S3 charges per gig on drive space used, per gig of transfer in and out, and per thousands of requests. Transfer out is slightly more expensive than transfer in, upload requests are slightly more expensive than download requests. There are no other charges. Amazon provides a handy little
calculator to estimate monthly charges, so we'll use this. Now we have to find some information to plug in -- we'll use the FA Forums, their
WikiFur article, and a bit from
the interview with all the gay banners. First, drive space needed:
Database size: This dump was something like 18~19GB, stored as SQL and uncompressed.
File system size: yak guesses 500GB.
We'll put in an order for 1TB -- $150/month for each terabyte used. It's automatically stored over a vague number of redundant drives. We could order another TB for backup, but FA doesn't have any sort of backup right now, so we'll forget that. Next is data transfer, according to WikiFur it's 80GB/day, 2400GB/month, split between transfer-in and transfer-out. It's heavily biased toward transfer-out, the more expensive option. We'll guess 2000GB/month out. Next are the PUT/LIST requests, generated whenever a user uploads some file. According to the interview that's 2500/day, or 75K/month. Other requests include GET requests, and WikiFur claims they serve 10 million of those a day: "The site transfers a daily average of nearly 80 GB of data and well over 10,000,000 individual files." So 300 million other requests per month. The calculator now gives us a total of $830.75 per month of hosting. This includes everything: heavily redundant data storage, money back if Amazon provides less than 99.99% uptime, professional server administration. No bottlenecks as FA is currently experiencing.
Compare to the current FA hosting fees. For the bandwidth:
But you are both missing out on the fact that supporting the colocation, power and bandwidth this website uses costs money, every month. And not just money, but nearly a thousand dollars a month. Yes, 1000$/mo.
And for the rackmount space:
Server costs, currently, are starting at $400 a month... and will only rise as the site improves
$1400/month, and we haven't even considered the price of their non-redundant hardware purchases. For that price, if anything goes bad -- one stick of RAM, one power supply, two hard drives -- the entire site comes down for two weeks while parts are procured and someone at the colo installs them. If the system crashes or goes down in a power failure it takes about 48 hours for someone to flip the switch back on. These are woes FA has already had so they're more than speculation.
FAP is currently spending about $200/month on its S3 hosting. (Since the prices are linear we can estimate they're using about 25% of the resources that FA is, just for trivia.) Should FAP ever explode in popularity and rise to equal FA's demand, their monthly costs would then rise to about what we just calculated, with no extra hardware expenditures. That's about $600 less per month than FA spends, with much more robust hosting. Amazon isn't even the cheapest solution available -- ServerBeach will offer 5 servers and 10TB/month for $850, that's four times as much transfer.
