I think in your case it would help if I posted a full summary of the complexities involved in doing what I/we do. I'm still doing that write-up (it's up to about 10KBytes at this time), but I'll give you a little more monetarily-focused explanation.Tormenter wrote:You can get a years hosting for $100 that will allow enough traffic for this site. Im sure they can scrape enough in donations for that.
I say all of this knowing that your above paragraph said, quote, "for this site". I'm not sure you know how much bandwidth/month this site uses, so I'll disclose that at the end.
We actually rent co-location (datacenter) 24U worth of rack space, and I personally own all the hardware in that rack. Switches, power management units, console redirection devices, all the servers themselves and all their components, etc.. The total cost of all the equipment comes to around US$15,000.
Our monthly cost (for rack space, bandwidth, etc.) is $775/month. My portion/cost of that (once excluding the dedicated server/business folks we have, who have their own boxes) comes to $650/month. This doesn't include things like general liability insurance (that's another $450/year), general upkeep (disk replacements), contracting fees (for people who I pay to assist when doing work in the datacenter), domain renewals, etc..
Finally, for the record: we get around $30/year, at most, in donations. Most of the time it's $20 one year, then a couple years will go by with nothing. I concluded long ago that Internet visitors in general are already having difficulty making ends meet (for themselves), thus they cannot afford such. Also, you have to remember that if you *rely* on donations to pay the bills, then they aren't really donations, are they? Those are more like "service fees", which isn't the kind of operation I run.
Could I have moved everything off to some hosting provider elsewhere for cheaper? Not easily. Each of our servers is physical/dedicated, rather than under a VM/hypervisor, so resources aren't shared (per se). The cheap hosting providers you see usually use VMs/HVs or offer things like a VPS. Dedicated servers (meaning you rent a physical box in a datacenter for your own use and nobody else shares it) are more like $150-200/month. Considering that we have 8 servers, well, you can do the math. :-)
As for nesdev's bandwidth -- this is what I sent Banshaku. Keep in mind when it comes to network traffic, kilo = 1000, not 1024.
You'll find lots of hosting providers do a very clever thing -- they either offer you lots of traffic/month but very little disk space, OR, lots of disk space but very little traffic/month. They do this to keep people from getting hosting and using it as a large repository for large files (movies, music, etc.), since bandwidth is expensive. We don't operate this way. Disk is disk, network is network. Disk space is cheap, network traffic isn't.nesdev.com (nesdev.com) -- not the Wiki part: The site takes up about 128kbit/sec worth of bandwidth (average). 128 * 60 * 60 * 24 * 30 = 331776000 kbits per month. That comes out to about 42GBytes/month average.
nesdev wiki (wiki.nesdev.com): The site takes up about 56kbit/sec worth of bandwidth (average). 56 * 60 * 60 * 24 * 30 = 145152000 kbits per month. That comes out to about 19GBytes/month average.
About disk space:
nesdev.com (nesdev.com) -- not the Wiki part -- takes up about 92MBytes of disk for just the website/data. The MySQL DB takes up 164MBytes of disk.
nesdev wiki (wiki.nesdev.com) -- takes up about 190MBytes of disk just for the website/data. The MySQL DB takes up 78MBytes of disk.