About LifeinBklyn

62.71 Prior Balance

Income:
96.62 Feb 2022 donation
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96.62 Total Income

Expenses:
20.42 1&1 Ionos - Site Hosting - 1/29/21 - 3/28/21 (2 months x 10.21 per month)
11.41 January 2021 AWS (Amazon Web Services)
2.62 February AWS
2.06 March
3.79 April AWS
3.95 May AWS
4.04 June AWS
3.83 July AWS
3.90 August AWS
3.86 September AWS
4.20 October AWS
4.15 November AWS
4.25 December AWS
9.20 January 2022 AWS
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81.68 Total Expenses
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77.65 Current Balance


In February 2021, the site moved from a “traditional” hosting model where we paid once monthly price for all resources to being fully hosted on Amazon Web Services, where most components are priced à la carte based on resources used and data transferred. We were taking advantage of some promotions that expired at the end of 2021 that saved around $6 a month.

In months where a lot of activity is going on, such as migrating lots of data (like January 2021) or heavy development, the cost will be higher, but here is the rough breakdown of the typical month of November:
$6.05 Server – compute and memory
$0.64 Server Storage
$1.55 Image Storage
$0.03 Image data transfer
$0.59 Domain Name Services Hosting and queries
$0.17 Backup storage

Domain Name Registration also costs about $24 a year plus tax ($12 each for lifeinbkln.com and lifeinbklyn.com), but that is pre-paid through Jul/Sep 2022, so had no expenses in 2021.
I will probable look in to pre-paying the server costs to get a discount there that will save a few bucks a month moving forward.
Overall, the average monthly cost of running the site is around $12 to $13 a month.

As always, financial assistance for the site is appreciated, but not required.

Since I made the last update, the process the moves images older then 3 days to backup storage is broken.
Will try to fix this weekend.

I'll be making a site update this evening.

It will fix the show/hide images bug

The bigger thing is that I re-wrote the site configuration file in preparation of future updates, so be on the lookout for strange bugs after I make the update.

Putting in a big change that I have been working on the last two weeks.
If all goes well, the site should load much faster with no change in functionality.

This is the single biggest change I have made to the site code in almost 6 years, and I expect at least some bugs.
Due to the nature of the changes, the most common bugs will probably be items not refreshing as expected.

Until now, you could access the site via the URLs lifeinbklyn.com, www.lifeinbklyn.com, lifeinbkln.com, or www.lifeinbkln.com

Now, when you enter any of the last 3 (or click on links), you will be redirected to lifeinbklyn.com.
People who were accessing via the other URLs will have to log in again once.

This will make future changes easier, and cut down on confusion when people post links that make others log in again.

97.45 Prior Balance

Income:
23.97 7/21/20 Paypal donation
96.80 1/1/21 Paypal donation
96.80 1/1/21 Paypal donation
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217.57 Total Income

Expenses:
80.00 1&1 Ionos - Site Hosting - 7/28/19 - 2/27/20 (8 months x $10 per month)
112.31 1&1 Ionos - Site Hosting - 2/28/20 - 1/28/21 (11 months x 10.21 per month)
12.00 Google Domain Name Registration : lifeinbkln.com 7/28/2021 - 7/27/2022
12.00 Google Domain Name Registration : lifeinbklyn.com 9/1/2021 - 8/30/2022
36.00 Amazon Web Services - Backup storage 1/1/2019 - 12/31/2020 (estimated $1.50 per month)
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252.31

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62.71 Current Balance
Note: Paypal amounts are after they take their cut of a few percent.

Currently the average monthly cost for the site is around $13.71:
10.31 Site Hosting
2.00 Domain Name Registration
1.50 Backup storage

With the recent changes I made, the site is much easier to move between hosting providers.
I am thinking of moving back to cheaper hosting provider, since if it starts crapping out on us like the last one, it will be pretty trivial to dump them for another.

I will also probably be changing the site code at some point this year to load older and/or full size images off of the backup storage, deleting them off the server.
With almost 10 years of posts, the disk requirements of the site keep growing, which limits the lower cost hosting plans we can use.
The storage for the old posts themselves are minimal compared to the images.
For those who care, here is the relative size of the site storage:
0.005 GB : Site code and static files
0.9 GB : Database (includes all post/comment text)
56 GB : Uploaded images

As always, financial assistance for the site is appreciated, but not required.