Hello again to everyone and a special welcome for the people who ended up coming here from Lemm.ee, as well as to anyone joining the Fediverse for their first time!
It's been a weird couple month(s) for us specifically with our issues with our donation holder. Lemm.ee shut down. We turned 2 years old! How time flies...
Donations
It was a stressful time! For those of you who didn't see; I hadn't been reimbursed from our donation account for over 2 months and hadn't heard anything from them. Eventually they must have seen our emails or word got around and the money was transferred to me.
Choosing to outsource the financials was a choice which I think most of the Lemmy servers have done (especially for OpenCollective), and was (probably still is) the easiest to setup. When I started Reddthat right at the start of the exodus of Reddit, I knew people would want to donate, whether it was out of spite, or for a better future. OpenCollective solve that and was incredibly easy to setup. As you don't have to fill out any paperwork besides from your details and bank account for reimbursements. It was a no-brainer for me especially when it came with complete transparency, which I have tried to provide to Reddthat across it's lifetime. This inherit decoupling of assets also came with risks I never imagined but I should have. Especially when beehaw had similar experiences. The writing was on the wall.
Now I have used my already setup Stripe account and finished Reddthat's liberapay. Which is over --> here if you want to see it. The major benefit just like OpenCollective, is that you can make the donation a Secret donation. So I personally will have no way to know who is donating. Obviously if that happens I wont be able to add your username to our list of heroes, but I think it's time for a change. Maybe let me know what you think the new section could be called in the comments?
So the long and the short of it is that now I control all of our financials so no need to worry about someone else not paying me or doing some exit scam.
Server Resources (tech speak time)
Recently we ended up having some timeouts due to memory issues. Fortunately this was solved temporarily by reducing the amount of connections (pools) we allowed Lemmy to use for it's database connections. But this is not why I'm bringing this up. Our database has grown to... Checks 108GB on our filesystem. This has always been on our radar. Especially when in our 1 Year Old post we reached approx 30GB.
Our current OVH server only has 158GB available. With everything else stored on our server we currently have used 124GB of our 158GB. So we only have ~28GB available. Which isn't a lot of wiggle room. Especially when we need to perform daily backups of the database too! Luckily the database does compress quite well and a lot of the indexes take a huge amount of data but there isn't anything I can do about that. To save data on the biggest culprit of indexes I'd have to remove some filtering options from our codebase. Which maybe might help but probably won't.
We are using approximately 5GB of storage per month at the moment. So in about 4 months time if we don't do anything we will be going offline because our server is out of space! Obviously I won't let that happen and have a nice solution planned in the coming months. A dedicated server.
Start reading here again if you skipped the tech speak
So we are slowly growing over time so we will need to increase our server resources again.
(Another) Migration
I seem to like this word. Migration. I use it a tonne at my $job while also seem to be using it more and more at my lemmy job too!
In August/September or sooner depending on when our renewal for our OVH server is, but we will be migrating to a Dedicated Server.
- CPU: E-2136 (6Core/12Thread) @ 3.50GHz
- Ram: 32GB
- HDD: 2x500GB (NVMe)
- BW: 10TB/month
- Cost: ~A$90/month
To put it in perspective we get 8 vCore, 16GB Ram and 160GB SSD for ~A$88/month. So for an extra $2/month we can get "infinite" storage, double our RAM and get a way better cpu as well!
Now let's not get ahead of ourselves. I'm not quite ready to pull the pin on it and have to double check a few things first to make sure this company is all on the up-and-up as when they say it's too good to be true, it probably is!
2 years!
Turning 2 years old has been a privilege. For those of you who have stuck with Reddthat since the early days of server issues, the recent server issues, and the many many migrations; I truely appreciate your interactions and the communities we are fostering on our own little corner of the web.
Now whenever I type 'red' in my browser if auto fills to a social site that I run. Which is kinda awesome. But it never would have been possible without everyone. So from the bottom of my heart.
Thankyou!
<3 Tiff
PS. I'm also toying with the idea of setting up a piefed instance for those of you whom want a more picture-style feed? Would people enjoy that? And if so, what should our domain name be?
Starting now I'll try and keep a running total at the bottom of these posts and some ideas of what the next months are going to bring. We are very stable at the moment. I manage to scape by as I bundle a lot of things with my own personal bills / items. Things we don't pay for: Email Sending, Git hosting & automated build server(s). As I use my own infrastructure for these items.
💸 "Expenses":
- Budget starting June: A$518.40
- June Costs: ~A$114
- July Costs: ~A$115
- August Costs: ~A$116
💰 Estimated Budget (At the start of the month before payment of that month)
- September: A$173.40 (+A$176.64) ~A$350.04
- October: A$233.04
- November: A$116.04
⭐ Donation "Statistics":
- New Donators in June & July: 5
- Thank you again! August is dedicated to you!
- Total Weekly: ~A$22 (Advance payment of A$176.64)
- Our first Public Donator: ⭐
~1883941 ⭐
Want a month dedicated to you? -> https://liberapay.com/reddthat