[winteriscoming]

I haven't hosted/run a site like this before. So I'm curious whether 17K a year to run a product like this is normal. If the author is willing to divulge the details, would love to know what takes the major chunk of that 17K.

[polpo]

He is certainly willing to divulge the details. He's posted his expenses yearly. Here are 2015's: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15RdDg3XyOGzW1T0Wjw9M...

[buro9]

Mine looks much the same, I pay GBP 6,900 per year to run 300 forums serving 200k users per month and over 8m page views per month.

Also in my costs are email (transactional via Mailgun, marketing via MailJet), DMARCian, AWS S3 for avatars and attachments, SSL (still paying for a wildcard, perhaps let's encrypt next time round), Google Apps for email to run the business.

It's realistic to spend around USD 10k per year running a moderately successful medium sized web business.

[idlewords]

Thanks for sharing that!

[deftnerd]

If you're looking to lower your S3 costs, there are some S3 compatible services now that are far cheaper.

Found this list: http://www.s3-client.com/s3-storage-providers.html

[buro9]

That's the tiniest cost I have.

S3 is all about controlling transfer costs, so I placed an Nginx file cache in front of my attachments and avatars and it obliterated my transfer costs.