Hosting costs – November 2017

In the spirit of continued transparency, and because I haven’t remembered to do this in a while, this is an accounting of Free Radical’s hosting costs for November 2017:

  • The DigitalOcean droplet and persistent block storage (for PostgreSQL) was $22.00.
  • The Amazon Web Services S3 media and backup storage cost $3.59.

The DigitalOcean CPU usage graph runs consistently at about 5%. Memory is always at about 70%, with most of it used by PostgreSQL for caching. Disk usage is at about 0% except during hourly backups. Bandwidth averages about 20Kbps except during those same offsite backups.

In summary, this glorious hot mess costs a total of about $25 per month and has a ridiculous amount of room for future growth.

If you’d like to help support Free Radical, please send $5 in cash to your nearest hungry-looking person and tell them Tek says hi.

We’re here for you and for good

I’ve had a hard time going cold turkey with birdsite but it gets easier by the day. I still think of it as the early service that was new and different and exciting and wasn’t being used as a machine for spreading hate. I need to break that habit, but it’s hard.

This morning I drank deeply of that cesspool and was shocked at how horrible it is. Was it always that bad and I was just used to it, or has it taken a recent and sharp turn for the worse? I don’t know. Either way, here we are.

I’ve been committed to Free Radical since its launch, and I want to publicly and explicitly reaffirm this: we’re here for the long haul. The world needs a good, distributed, self-hosted social media network and I think that we’ve found it. I might not have posted a lot lately – life happens – but I’m here for you.

Let’s build something good!

Welcome to my living room

Several times I’ve compared this instance to my living room. I think that’s a powerful and accurate analogy and I’d like to explain what I mean by that.

Even if no one else came around, I’d still have my home and my living room. It’d be boring and quiet, though! I’d much rather be surrounded by friends, and if you’re in my house, I assume that you’re my friend. I’m glad you’re here and want you to have a nice time! I also imagine that we’re in an apartment complex, surrounded by other people who also have living rooms and have invited friends over.

Continue reading Welcome to my living room