Raymii.org

Table of Contents

• Cost breakdown

Inspired by recent articles from Kev Quirk, Horst Gutmann and Jan-Lukas where they do a cost breakdown of their sites, I decided to do one as well. Kev is around USD 30, Horst is around USD 13 and Jan-Lukas is around 5 USD. Their breakdowns are interesting, from specific wordpress plugins to CDN or DNS costs. I don't have those, but I do have a multitude of small servers running this site, which add up to around USD 20, adding up two domain names gives me around USD 22 per month. It could be a lot cheaper, I only need one server for the gigantuous amounts of static HTML this site consists of, but I do have around 10.000 unique visitors each day, so having redundancy is nice. If I would go all cheap, this site would cost me no more than 2 USD a month including the domain name, but that would take the fun out of it.

This site is generated with my self-written open source static site generator named ingsoc (named after 1984). The hosting therefore consists of just simple VPS servers, running some form of Linux or BSD that I can manage with Ansible. The [VPS servers][99] don't need many resources, 2 GB of disk and 128 MB of RAM is enough, all of the current servers have better specs because nobody sells low end VPSes anymore. After the first sale of LowEndBox.org the fun was gone there, I used to be very active on the site and forum there.

Recently I removed all Google Ads from this site due to their invasive tracking, as well as Google Analytics. Please, if you found this content useful, consider a small donation using any of the options below:

I'm developing an open source monitoring app called Leaf Node Monitoring, for windows, linux & android. Go check it out!

Consider sponsoring me on Github. It means the world to me if you show your appreciation and you'll help pay the server costs.

You can also sponsor me by getting a Digital Ocean VPS. With this referral link you'll get $200 credit for 60 days. Spend $25 after your credit expires and I'll get $25!

I sometimes write updates on new changes in ingsoc, those articles can be found here.

Here is a list of How much does my site cost me articles I found and enjoyed:

• Kev Quirk
• Guillermo Garron
• Horst Gutmann
• Jan-Lukas
• Hyde (dedicated server, wow)
• Roland Szabo
• Gregory Hammond
• Alex Lueken

Cost breakdown

This site uses multiple servers spread around the world. The up to date list can be found on the Cluster Status page and as of now also has the monthly cost of the servers.

Service	Montly Cost
VPS (6)	USD 20 (EUR 8.70 + USD 9.30, conversion rate varies)
Domain (2)	EUR 2

I use two domain names, one for the site (raymii.org) and one for the servers (spnw.nl, stands for Sparkling Network). Both domain names cost me EUR 12.50 a year. The servers vary, I like to play with other providers, but I keep it less than 20 USD per month.

There are no other costs, no seperate DNS hosting, no CDN, no wordpress plugins, none. This site does use github as a middleman for the servers to do their hourly checkout, but that is optional. Whenever I do an update, my scripts place the content as well. The fallback via github is for either the initial checkout or when a server has been offline for a while.

Tags: blog , cli , cost , ingsoc , python , raymiiorg , server , site