We started doing Image Hosting, and honestly it’s been quite a hit. We’ve had lots of use, and very little abuse. So far we’re at about 550 Gb worth of images, which is incredible. Thank you to everyone for participating.
In anticipation of us moving to both image and video hosting, we started some research and found what we considered to be a low-cost online storage. This way the storage is available even if Squidge goes down. But we’ve not crossed the one-month mark in our hosting and I found out our next bill is estimated to be MORE than US$200 – FOR A SINGLE MONTH.
This is unsustainable. We managed just about $3,000 in donations last year, up from about $2600 the year before. Our webhosting costs have been our biggest expense, outside of the $400/year that we have to lay out for legal expenses. There’s literally no way in our current environment to continue this. If we had to pay out more than $200 per month on top of our existing basic expenses, we would need to take in almost double what we have been taking in. We would need $4,780 just to meet the bare minimum of these three expenses alone. And there’s nothing saying that the image hosting costs won’t skyrocket from here.
So we’re at a crossroads. What I think we should do is cancel our online storage and go back to doing all our image hosting ourselves. We can do this – but the problem comes with the fact that if we go down for any reason (and long-time users may remember – we have been down up to 10 days in the past!) image hosting will be down as well.
Before we do anything, I would like people’s opinions on the situation. Are we good with going it alone again? We’ll just need the cost of a new server (which we already have) plus hard drive enclosure, RAID software and two large disks plus the cost of off-site backups. It may have a larger up-front cost ($1,200 or so) but that would be it. Or, do we close image hosting to new users and limit what people can upload?
Please share your thoughts.
Would it be possible to do a temporary limit (rate limit?) until we can get the hardware up? After that it would be possible to work on at least paralleling self-hosting with online storage.
I’m comfortable with the risk of Squidge going down; I wish i had the income to be like “I CAN PAY THAT!!” but obviously i can’t, lol. i would rather more long-term storage certainty even if in the short-term stuff gets borked
I’d definitely be in the camp of going it alone/that feels more sustainable. While it’s not as neat as dual hosting audio in the same audio html tag, it’s always possible to link to a mirror image as an alternate source, etc. and I feel like I’d rather know my images are being stored and kept, even if I can’t get at this at this moment, is more important to me than guaranteed uptime. (And, as always, thank you !)
If it’s too expensive to maintain, I would rather see you going back to how it was before. Besides, if the hosting goes down for any reasons people only need to be patient. I still remember Internet Archive going down for extended period of time. That was something and yet it always come back.
In my opinion as a new user, it makes more sense to go the sustainable route and go it alone, even with the risk of the images going down with the archive during temporary outages.
I think closing video hosting might be the best option- my understanding is that video is what takes the most space and therefore money compared to simple images.
I agree, I don’t know how many videos are being hosted but they’ll space and bandwidth like monsters compared to images. It’s a nice thing to have but a lot of sites (including Bluesky until quite recently!) just can’t sustain the costs of it. If the money situation changes in the future it could be added back.
I’m comfortable with weathering downtime and going with the more sustainable option. Especially since costs would be rising in the future (storage is going to get more expensive, esp. with AI hunger) and you can’t know what’s going to happen next year, the year after etc. A new server with RAID seems like the better option at this particular juncture.
I use the image hosting for still images and gifs on fics (here and AO3) and I’d be happy to risk occasional downtime to save on costs. Squidge is the best place for me to keep my fic images even with a bit of downtime – I can’t use imgur in the UK due to recent legal changes here, for instance. Limiting new users for a time and placing file size limits might be a good idea as well if that’s necessary. I’d like some advance warning if limits are placed though so that I could see about reducing the space I’m using before any change hits.