adikos.net

Khremata

Well, it's the Ides of March, always an interesting time to reminisce. But I digress. We are talking a bit about money today, χρήματα (khremata).

My friend recently wrote a post about how much it costs, roughly, to run their website. And I thought about it and figured I would do the same, because it's an interesting data point. It's not something I've thought about much. Running this website is really important to me, and IMHO, well worth the money. I have a repository to share my thoughts with the world (qualescumque sint, "of whatsoever quality they may be"), and I also run services for myself, family, and friends. The services (NextCloud; Navidrome; Vaultwarden; Phanpy; &c.) are ones I myself use pretty much every day, and most of them I am happy to share with others. So I get a lot of personal utility out of the site, but I also like sharing my thoughts with others, not only in hopes that they'll be helpful, but also because it serves as a record for myself. Of course our thoughts are almost always distilled, mediated, edited; if you got my unedited, pure thoughts, it would be like automatic writing, just pure stream-of-consciousness; who knows what would come out! I'm OK having some control. I always aim to present an authentic portrait of myself, despite that mediation. I rarely edit things on here, except to correct factual inaccuracies or update things here and there. And I'm OK with that too. I remember, laughably, writing at one point of a previous iteration of this blog, "This will become a book one day. I swear it." Uh, never did. And that's OK too. I don't like the idea of sharing those juvenilia with anyone really; my blogs from 2003-2008/9? were unremarkable annals. I revisited them in part looking through a WordPress dump, and I don't care to return to all that. In any case, ultimately I'm happy to have this space to share with y'all.

Here's a breakdown of costs to run this website:

Cost per year for each:

Therefore, total cost to run this site is ~$210.50 USD/year.

I feel like I was paying a lot to run a site on Squarespace back in the day. I had a site on there ca. 2014-16, while I was on the tenure-track job market. At the time of writing, Squarespace's "Basic" plan is $16 USD/month = $192/year. That includes a domain, true, and hosting, but still. You get your site and it's all managed for you. That's a savings in time, but a loss in versatility. For $20 USD/year more (so one more month, roughly), I have a whole computer to play around with, put whatever I want on it, and also run my site. Granted, again, running a webserver can be a timesuck, and does require technical skills. But it is doable, even if you're very new to this sort of thing. And I think it's worth it. DreamHost, where I had my WordPress site for a time, was decent while I had it, but again, limited, and after the initial deal, they jack up the price by about 30%, at least at the time of writing, for the managed WP hosting. But again, since I have the technical know-how, I'd rather pay a little more and have near-complete control of my server.

I could always get a cheaper VPS with lower specs, I suppose, and less disk space. But I like having space for my music, for whatever other files I want to put on there. It's lovely. And again, it is a little expensive (works out to about $18 USD/month), but I love it. And I'd rather cut in other areas than this one. It is well worth it to me. And I'd like to be able to place as many public services on my server as possible, for others to use and enjoy, if they like. I do have private services on here that only I and friends/family use, but there are plenty of public ones. I don't know what other ones to add at the moment, but I am always thinking about it in the back of my mind.

If you have a VPS yourself, have you tallied up the costs? Is it worth it to you? I'd be interested to know the answer. I know everyone has different needs and requirements. Thanks for reading, friends <3