Just a reminder in the year our lord 2018 that Archiveofourown.org is NON-PROFIT organization that manages a large FREE TO USE site that DOES NOT HAVE ADVERTISEMENTS AND DOES NOT SELL YOUR INFORMATION.
They do twice yearly donation drives which the VAST MAJORITY OF goes to paying for SERVER FEES.
TL;DR: Servers are super expensive, Ao3, a non-profit, asks for voluntary donations to help pay for them.
Hey friends! I know you all value AO3 (because if you don’t, why the fuck are you following me) so help them out if you can!
I’m an IT director and the page link provides another high level roll-up of the actual expenses, nowhere near the level of detail I’m used to, but what this tells me is that they’re maintaining their own hardware in a co-lo (renting space in a data center that provides internet access). Makes me curious why they’ve chosen that model rather than cloud hosting. Having done budgets like this for years, I feel for them. And it’s not just the servers, it’s all the ancillary costs so that they’re usable and the program is viable.
The original idea of AO3 was to own the actual physical servers on the theory that this would give maximum control over our own content and minimum vulnerability to being shut down for spurious reasons. In practice, I have no idea how vulnerable cloud hosting is to false reports like antis/religious wackos/angry rights holders like to send, but that was the philosophy behind the choice.
@olimlacus I would also say as the load becomes higher then having your own servers becomes cost effective as you don’t have to pay for amazon’s profit margin. We don’t pay for staff right now and that takes one of the very large costs away ( it does have its down sides ). If you look at simularweb they say we are in the top 300 sites world wide. On a busy night we push 25,000 pages a minute for a total of about 800 million pages a month.
“The cloud,” as in “I’ll just throw aallll my data and activity on someone else’s computers,” did not exist when AO3 got started. (Gmail was a new amazing service with two whole gigabytes of free storage. You needed an invitation to get an account.) (Open reg in the US started in mid-2007.)
By the time “the cloud” became common for business use, and had high enough capacity that the OTW could even think about it, the legal landscape was creepy enough, with enough data breaches, that the OTW was able to say, “whatever money we might save is not worth the risks of storing all our data on Amazon’s servers.”
