I’ve promised some insight into how much running the tinderbox actually costed me. And since today marks two months from Google AdSense’s crazy blacklisting of my website, I guess it’s a good a time as any other.
SO let’s start with the obvious first expense: the hardware itself. My original Tinderbox was running on the box I called Yamato, which costed me some €1700 and change, without the harddrives, this was back in 2008 — and about half the cost was paid with donation from users. Over time, Yamato had to have its disks replaced a couple of times (and sometimes the cost came out of donations). That computer has been used for other purposes, including as my primary desktop for a long time, so I can’t really complain about the parts that I had to pay myself. Other devices, and connectivity, and all those things, ended up being shared between my tinderbox efforts and my freelancing job, so I also don’t complain about those in the least.
The new Tinderbox host is Excelsior, which has been bought with the Pledgie which got me paying only some $1200 of my pocket, the rest coming in from the contributors. The space, power and bandwidth, have been offered by my employer which solved quite a few problems. Since now I don’t have t pay for the power, and last time I went back to Italy (in June) I turned off, and got rid of, most of my hardware (the router was already having some trouble; Yamato’s motherboard was having trouble anyway, I saved the harddrive to decide what to do, and sold the NAS to a friend of mine), I can assess how much I was spending on the power bill for that answer.
My usual power bill was somewhere around €270 — which obviously includes all the usual house power consumption as well as my hardware and, due to the way the power is billed in Italy, an advance on the next bill. The bill for the months between July and September, the first one where I was fully out of my house, was for -€67 and no, it’s not a typo, it was a negative bill! Calculator at hand, he actual difference between between the previous bills and the new is around €50 month — assuming that only a third of that was about the tinderbox hardware, that makes it around €17 per month spent on the power bill. It’s not much but it adds up. Connectivity — that’s hard to assess, so I’d rather not even go there.
With the current setup, there is of course one expense that wasn’t there before: AWS. The logs that the tinderbox generates are stored on S3, since they need to be accessible, and they are lots. And one of the reasons why Mike is behaving like a child about me just linking the build logs instead of attaching them, is that he expects me to delete them because they are too expensive to keep indefinitely. So, how much does the S3 storage cost me? Right now, it costs me a whopping $0.90 a month. Yes you got it right, it costs me less than one dollar a month for all the storage. I guess the reason is because they are not stored for high reliability or high speed access, and they are highly compressible (even though they are not compressed by default).
You can probably guess at this point that I’m not going to clear out the logs from AWS for a very long time at this point. Although I would like for some logs not to be so big for nothing — like the sdlmame one that used to use the -v switch to GCC which causes all the calls to print a long bunch of internal data that is rarely useful on a default log output.
Luckily for me (and for the users relying on the tinderbox output!) those expenses are well covered with the Flattr revenue from my blog’s posts — and thank to Socialvest I no longer have to have doubts on whether I should keep the money or use it to flattr others — I currently have over €100 ready for the next six/seven months worth of flattrs) Before this, between my freelancer’s jobs, Flattr, and the ads on the blog, I would also be able to cover at least the cost of the server (and barely the cost of the domains — but that’s partly my fault for having.. a number).
Unfortunately, as I said at the top of the post, there no longer are ads served by Google on my blog. Why? Well, a month and a half ago I received a complain from Google, saying that one post of mine in which I namechecked a famous adult website, in the context of a (at the time) recent perceived security issue, is adult material, and that it goes against the AdSense policies to have ads served on a website with adult content. I would still argue that just namechecking a website shouldn’t be considered adult content, but while I did submit an appeal to Google, a month and a half later I have no response at hand. They didn’t blacklist the whole domain though, they only blacklisted my blog, so the ads are still showed on Autotools Mythbuster (which I count to resume working almost full time pretty soon) but the result is bleak: I went down from €12-€16 a month to a low €2 a month due to this, and that is no longer able to cover for the serve expense by itself.
This does not mean that anything will change in the future, immediate or not. This blog for me has more value than the money that I can get back from it, as it’s a way for me to showcase my ability and, to a point, get employment — but you can understand that it still upsets me a liiiittle bit the way they handled that particular issue.
