In the interest of transparency, I'll be aiming to make a post at the start of each month detailing the income and expenses for the prior month as it relates to aussie.zone.
A huge thank you to everyone that has donated on my Ko-Fi page. It is because of your support that aussie.zone will continue to operate.
Income
Net donations received for June 2023 was ~$335 AUD. ๐๐ This is incredibly generous of everyone, especially given the current cost of living pressures we're all facing. Thank you.
When I first launched the Ko-fi page, I hadn't realised it defaulted to USD. So some donors may have unwittingly donated in USD. My apologies, I did send an email to all donors up until that point to make them aware.
A special thank you to those that have commited to contribute monthly. This is massively appreciated!
Expenses
Expenses this month were OVH hosting ($33) and Porkbun domain registration ($9). Wasabi object storage is at the end of its first month being free, and will incur costs in a week or so.
Balance
$335 - $42 = ~$293 surplus at current costs. However given the recent surge in users and their associated resource utilisation on the server, I'm expecting to upgrade the VPS in the next few weeks.
THANK YOU
I'd like to recognise and thank donors in some way. Lemmy does not currently have anything built in to recognise them that I'm aware of. I'm open to ideas. One perk I'd like to offer is an @aussie.zone email address redirect. Any donors that would like to take this up, please hit me up ๐
I've heard horror stories of Oracle free tier services being shutdown without notice. And I've not checked, but I doubt their traffic/bandwidth allowances are cost effective for a lemmy instance.
Happens all the time to my personal build servers. Working one minute then all offline. Part of being the free tier and the only worthwhile option is the ARM server and Lemmy's automatic arm builds are currently not working. They also "recover" unused services, so you have to have ~10% CPU usage otherwise they will turn your servers off because they are "unused".
But 10TB/month... Is certainly nice.
10TB/month for free... I wouldn't have any faith that will persist long term.
10TB may be free, but as soon as you use 1byte over that, they'll probably bill you, make you sign a contract, and force you into using oracle products for the next decade ๐คฃ
I've had no problems with them for 2 years now. Except once, when they had changed the IP address once without notice. Never had anything turned off, I am using <10% CPU.
For a personal project, brilliant. For something with close to 1500 users now... I'll stay clear ๐