I’m in an interesting place, financially: after about seven years of hosting websites and projects, I’ve broken even. Incoming donations cover all hosting expenses. (And those expenses have grown substantially over the years.)
a brief history
For the first several years, I used PHP and shared hosting services, which is a pretty cheap combination. I switched hosting providers a few times, but this cost me a pretty consistent $1-$2 per month.
Around 2021 (I don’t recall exactly), I switched to a virtual private server from A2 Hosting, which was one of the more expensive options I could’ve picked, but gave a ton of performance for that cost. I believe I was paying around $10 per month for 400GB of storage space, 4GB of RAM, and 4 CPU cores. Not a bad deal at all (though the renewal costs would have been significantly higher if I’d stayed longer than the first year).
I jumped around between VPS providers a couple of times, staying in the $8-$10 per month range.
Then, about the time I started at university, I discovered Uberspace. I’ve written about Uberspace before, but to summarize: they have an amazing pay-what-you-can business model that I love.
Uberspace was, in effect, as much space as I needed to host everything I had at the time at a price that I could afford. I relaxed, started developing better methods of coding websites instead of figuring out new ways to host them, and started slowly accumulating things that I was hosting.
Last year, I started Polymaths.social, a Fediverse instance that I hosted on a separate Uberspace account. This worked pretty well, even when I eventually merged it back into my main Uberspace account. I also started accepting donations, which was a significant turning point for me, as some of my hosting costs started being covered.
The problem with hosting with Uberspace was the limited storage space; you get 10GB by default, and each additional 10GB is €3/mo. For a long time, everything I hosted had fit just fine within the 10GB of space, but adding a social media platform federated with over 5,000 servers started filling up database space fast. I started paying for Object Storage for the media and, eventually, also for 10GB of extra space for the growing database.
That was working; it wasn’t gonna be sustainable in the long-term, but I figured that I would eventually get a VPS for Polymaths.social once it grew too large for Uberspace.
Then I started Clew. At first, it fit on Uberspace. But as I scaled up the size of the search index, it too started taking up a ton of storage space, and I upgraded the Uberspace account again, but computing power was also starting to be stretched thin between everything I hosted.
So, I decided to make the move and get a dedicated server. When I added up the costs of hosting everything that I needed, including expected growth in the future, I had finally reached the point where it made financial sense.
I got a $28/mo server from OVH and moved everything to it. Everything on my Uberspace account, my home server, the media I’d been paying for object storage for, my remote backups I’d been paying for… everything. And it all fit, with tons of room to spare.
So that’s where I am now, and where I will remain for the foreseeable future.
incoming donations
As the latter drama was unfolding, donations to Polymaths.social and Clew started steadily climbing. The complexity of my hosting solution made tracking the finances a little difficult, though. When I moved everything to a single server, though, I realized that I had broken even. Incoming recurring donations match the amount I’m paying for hosting.
For seven years I’ve been paying for hosting out of my own savings (and I don’t really have an income, so most of that time it was my allowance), and now, finally, I’m able to host everything I do at no financial cost to myself. That’s huge. For the vast majority of hobbyists hosting open source projects and the like, that’s still a distant goal.
I’m hugely grateful to everyone who has donated to help make this possible, your generosity is what has made the level of things I’m doing possible, in a very real sense. I don’t think I’d have been able to justify paying $30/month (plus about $10/month for domain registration) out of my savings toward web hosting, so I wouldn’t have been able to launch some of the projects I have, like Clew.
It’s a little odd that what is, objectively, a small amount of incoming money would give me as much of a feeling of financial security as it has. But that little amount is already changing my thought processes about money and how I spend it.
a shift in perspective
I think the issue with me having paid for hosting so long out of my savings is that it made me much more hesitant to spend money anywhere else. My own mother, speaking to someone else, described me as a “miser” which, to be honest, was pretty accurate. (If you’re reading this, mom, love ya!)
Since realizing I’m breaking even, though, I’ve also noticed that I’m thinking about money differently. I’m not more prone to impulse purchases—I meticulously keep track of my personal finances with hledger, a practice which I’ve found helps curb impulse purchases significantly for me. Instead, when considering a purchase, my calculus of what is “worth it” has significantly changed, especially in favor of purchases towards entertainment.
Used to be, I would never buy snacks, candy, or anything really for my entertainment, with a few small exceptions. Recently, though, I’ve bought a few video games (ones I’ve loved, too), music, sci-fi magazine subscriptions, and the like. Overall, I think these purchases have actually increased my mental health in a significant way.
You see, my free time used to be wholly spent in “productive” pastimes, like coding websites and writing. I still do those activities, to a significant degree, but now I also spend more time relaxing, which I think is healthy.
I’ve also noticed that I’ve been considering larger purchases in a different light, dividing out the cost over the useful lifetime of the products to see how it compares to other options. I haven’t acted on that yet, but it’s been interesting to observe in my own thought processes.
conclusion
Overall, this has been a very positive shift and one that I think will continue to develop in my favor.
I think that I will be doing a series on this, perhaps examining my thought processes for some specific types of purchase, with the new financial security I have. I don’t know if any of these articles will develop into me actually buying things (old habits die hard) but it might be an interesting insight for myself in the process and could be interesting to others who are in the process of developing healthy ways to think about money.
