I know I’ve mentioned the possibility of bandwidth being an issue. But…
@LockeCJ can verify, but from what I’ve seen of how discourse works, the platform seems pretty good about only sending what a viewer is currently looking at to them. I definitely could be wrong, but I assume that old pictures are mostly going to be seen by people going through old threads, which is probably going to be a one-time thing.
There is also a pretty decent restriction on the size of posted gifs, which should help?
I would assume there are storage constraints, but others would be better to speak to that.
I used to be on a discussion board where every so often we’d pass the hat to offset costs of eliminating ads. That board had a feature to collect payments. Here, we’d just need a special PayPal / Venmo / CashApp that @LockeCJ could use just for this. Be easy enough to setup.
Disk space is cheap these days. I’d rather we continue to preserve things at least as long as people are still using them.
There’s a whole philosophical discussion about how anything posted on the web is paradoxically simultaneously both ephemeral and also eternal. Which is an interesting topic of its own.
But I think link rot and the associated loss of context, such as having images just broken is not nice.
I’d rather fund a couple terabytes more disk space than see things start disappearing or breaking.
Regarding responsible monetisation, and ignoring the technicalities and just wanting to say “Ta, you lovely people”, I would happily contribute to a tip jar.
In an ideal world I fully agree. As an example, there was one classic fun-filled thread at TOP from years ago that I did revisit two or three times more recently, but last time I did it seemed some of the images, gifs, videos, etc. had gone AWOL.
(For anyone interested, it was this one, which first inspired me to adopt my current icon rather than the bland one assigned by the site.)
FWIW I am very prepared to chip in financially to support the Café’s rent payments, and might be able to occasionally offer up a ‘blog’ article of my own, but I guess mostly it’s the ability to add links to other stuff for the delectation and discussion of the Café regulars that appeals. (To be honest I was always rather more active in the ‘response to a blog post’ threads at TOP than in the non-blog post threads.)
I see the discussion about posting such things in pre-existing ‘theme’ threads vs. in their own dedicated thread, and I suspect that’s always going to be a judgment call, mediated by anyone’s (lack of) familiarity with exiting threads where it might have better fitted.
Hey-ho - still largely sitting in the corner watching what’s going on.
Yes and no. The server this site resides on has a limited amount of storage, as originally configured. In fact, this is (at least) the second server the site has run on, although this one has (I think) the same configuration. It was perfectly fine seven years ago when we started, but is starting to feel a bit cramped. Actually, we ran out of space quite a while ago due to the expanding size of the backups for the site. I added an additional storage volume for backups, which freed up space on the main volume. In a pinch, I could move the uploads to that second volume and have some additional headroom to delay the inevitable.
Besides that, I have a handful of options:
Expand the server that the site is hosted on:
This is the simplest, but least cost effective.
This would increase storage, compute, and Memory simultaneously.
It’s not possible to only increase storage.
This would increase the limit, but it’s still a hard limit.
Viewed purely from that lens, additional storage costs $0.20-$0.30/GB/Month.
Add another volume for uploads:
This is also a fairly simple.
This is also a hard limit. It can be increased, but it’s manual.
Additional storage costs $0.10/GB/Month.
Make use of Object Storage:
This is more complicated, but supported directly in Discourse.
This is the most flexible, and counterintuitively, the most cost efficient.
This may have a practical limit, but for our purposes it’s effectively unlimited.
There are multiple players in this space, so there’s some amount of competitive pricing:
Amazon S3 costs $26/TB/Month, or ~$0.026/GB/Month
Backblaze B2 costs $6/TB/Month or ~$0.006/GB/Month
Microsoft Azure costs $20/TB/Month or ~$0.02/GB/Month
Google Cloud costs $23/TB/Month or ~$0.023/GB/Month
Cloudflare R2 costs $0.015/GB/Month
Storj costs $0.004/GB/Month
Most of these also have egress fees that may affect things, but I left them out for simplicity’s sake. I’m leaning towards Backblaze B2 because it’s known to be compatible, fairly widely used among Discourse installations, and I’m already using it for other purposes. It’s also the second least expensive on the list, which is not a coincidence.
Using Backblaze B2 as an example. Our current storage usage of 20GB for uploads and ~60GB for backups would cost $0.48/Month vs. the $20/Month I’m currently spending on 200GB of block storage. In other words, in order to start spending the same amount on storage each month, we would need to increase our needs to over 3 TB for both uploads and backups, an increase of 42x. That’s a lot of gifs.
Technically speaking, we’re already using cloud storage. As you can see above, moving to native cloud storage is really the only way to get better rates and flexibility. It will also likely be faster in general (even more so if we make use of a CDN.)
Agree on using more storage as needed rather than trying to expire content. As you can see above, we don’t have to break the bank to do so.
I guess the big downside to “someone else’s computer” is just ceding control of Elsewhere’s very existence to the whims of a large, perhaps-not-exactly-not-evil corporation and its own service reliability. It’s all part of the calculus, I suppose.
This site has been hosted at DigitalOcean since the very beginning. It would not have been possible to stand it up as quickly or as cheaply without taking advantage of the economies of scale that a cloud platform is built on. While this arrangement does make us dependent on one or more service providers, I don’t know of any way to host a website on the Internet that doesn’t depend on at least one service that could be severed at any time. I could potentially host it from my own hardware, but I would have the initial hardware cost and maintenance, plus I would be responsible for backup power and providing a stable internet connection. I’m not saying it’s not possible, but it’s a lot of work for something that is probably less reliable. Co-location could also be an option, and one that I’ve seriously considered, but it still has the problem of initial hardware cost, and I would also need to find a hosting facility that is nearby enough that I could access the hardware in the event that it needed servicing. I’ve looked, and although there is a facility near enough, they don’t have any free capacity at the moment. That takes into account that I had to find a facility that would lease me individual units in a rack rather a full one. Even then, then monthly costs would easily be twice what I’m paying now, and 4x what I could be paying with a properly configured cloud setup. In fairness, the amount of compute, storage, etc. that we would end up with would be substantially more, but we don’t have a compelling need for that.
All of that is not to say that I want to tear down your concerns, but I don’t have a way to address them without additional compromises.
I know you think long and hard about all these things, and it’s a tribute to your talent, wisdom, and dedication that this place has been here without interruption for seven years already. I myself have no concerns about the way you’ve run things here. And I figure you’ll let us know if you ever want or need any help. Hope so anyway!
Yup; I used to post links to images I had posted in a discord that I am in, and Discord itself started expiring those direct links after a year. For me, it means that every time I find one of my blog posts and trip over a now-dead link, I have to find the damn picture on my local storage and re-upload it to my hosted web site and re-build the link. So much for ease of use…
I used to self-host my own vanity domain for a number of years on a gussied up mini-tower that was old and underpowered even for it’s time; after the second security breach*, I ultimately said ‘fuck it’ and switched to a more normal hosted solution for a number of years after that, and then switched to Dreamhost after getting tired of odd outages that the provider refused to acknowledge, or gave no notice on scheduled outages.
(* it’s really odd when the ISP’s Tech Support CALLS YOU! and says “So, about that open relay you appear to be running…” )
As someone who frequently posted pictures at TOP I would like to do my bit to cover costs.
gardening pics
animal pics
strange and/or unusual things I see on my travels
dopey memes
I am happy to contribute by any number of methods, including but not limited to cash, Zelle, venmo, payments via goods such as vegetables and beer, or via performance art such as juggling poorly or pinch-hitting at karaoke
I am ok with gifs and memes expiring (to some extent), but where i don’t love the idea of content expiring is if people are posting pictures, videos, gifs, etc that they themselves created. Those can’t be replaced as easily.
If there are attachments that are too large perhaps there is a way to offer the option compress or reduce the size of certain things to make it more appropriate for the BBS. I doubt that a picture i take at 4K would be necessary here, reducing it to something more manageable would be ok with me.
I have a pretty low-cost colo setup, and even so, I’m sure it costs me a good bit more than your current setup. I can’t imagine trying to set up colo just for a single site like this, especially when you consider that a cloud setup probably has much more bandwidth, redundant power, and other perks that would cost extra for colo. And, yes, if you’re going it alone, remote hands costs are absolute insanity in most facilities so there’s the cost (either in money or your time) to deal with anything that goes wrong.
And colo still involves being at the whims of the facility (or, for a cheaper provider, the whims of the facilities they use), which could cut off the bandwidth/power at any time for any number of reasons.
So much for ease of use…