[Svip]

I was approached about a decade ago to combine The Infosphere with then Wikia's Futurama wiki. I asked it was possible to do a no-ads version of the wiki, and while initially they seemed like that might be possible, they eventually said no, and so we said no. So now there are two Futurama wikis online. I still host The Infosphere, haven't checked the Fandom one in years.

Fortunately for me, Futurama isn't as popular as Minecraft (for some reason!), so I've been able to pay out of my own pocket.

[Svip]

A bit of a follow up to this; after a bit of thought, I am considering reaching out to Weird Gloop. I do not feel I am able to give The Infosphere the care that it deserves. And with Futurama back on Hulu, we are naturally seeing an uptick in activity. We have a very restrictive sign up in place, because I don't have time to moderate it anymore. It keeps the spam down, yes, but also new users away.

Note: The reason I'm writing I'm _considering_ reaching out and not just straight up reaching out is because the domain itself has a different owner than me, and I want to make sure they are also approving of this decision.

[stavros]

What kind of costs are associated with something like this, and what sort of visitors are you getting? I'm wondering what kind of infrastructure you need.

[Svip]

Importantly, I have since set up Cloudflare before the website to help. I am just using their free tier, but looking at their analytics, they say we got about 350k HTTP(S) requests in the last 24 hours.

Had it not been for Cloudflare, I am not sure my server could have handled that. Before I did that, I set up Varnish as a cache provider for users who are not logged in. That is effectively the second line of defence now.

The server itself is a dedicated server at Hetzner. I use the server for a bunch of other things, that see nowhere near the same activity as the Infosphere, and I also use it for my personal screen+irssi setup. But all in all, the server costs me about 50 euros a month.

Though, again, Cloudflare is basically the single most important reason it's not costing me more, and why I have not needed to hand it over.

[stavros]

Ah OK, that's basically exactly the setup I'd use as well. Surprising that the server alone couldn't handle the traffic, as the sibling says, 4 rps isn't that much when you cache (cache hits are basically free).

I imagine 90% of the traffic (or more) is anonymous users, which can be cached, doesn't Varnish handle that without breaking a sweat?

[account42]

4 requests per second is absolutely something even a cheap VPS should be able to handle, even if you double that for peak load. You just need to put caching in front of everything dynamic.

Disappointing for people just carelessly giving Buttflare the keys to the kingdom and effectively excluding alternative Browser users without considering other options.

[cduzz]

An off-hand reference to "350k/day" shouldn't be naively translated to "4 per second"

350k/ day likely means sometimes it's 3.5 million, all smashed into a 30 minute period of time, because some nitwit linked to my site.

And then, I get paged about "my site being down" and I have to stop hanging out with my friends or family and fiddle around with things I don't want to fuzz with. Or maybe it just breaks and doesn't self heal and it is offline for a week until I notice it and fix it, and by then people all think the site's gone.

Anyhow, sure, maybe people not wanting to devote their lives to devops fanfic is something that can "just be solved with this simple trick cloudflare hates" but maybe not.

[Svip]

To keep it simple, this is also a response to your sibling: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41807715

It's been a long time since I switched to Cloudflare. Looking through my email archive, it was December 2015. I uncovered an old discussion[0] about the switch, but it only seems to highlight that the server is slow.

But I think it speaks to my lack of skill in this area. I have no actual professional training in system administration, and entirely autodidactic in this area. Though it sounds like Weird Gloop can also provide guidance in these matters rather than simply taking on the hosting. I won't deny that at times I have felt defeated, and that may truly have been my reasoning for switching to Cloudflare.

Though this post and response so far have given me hope.

[0] https://theinfosphere.org/Table:Server_news! (the exclamation point is part of the URL, in case HN ignores it)

[echelon]

Their growth people emailed me again and again and tried to do the same with StrategyWiki decades ago.

Here's one of their emails:

> [Redacted] mentioned that your site was very cool - and that you're heading off to college. As you may know, Wikia is founded by Jimmy Wales (of wikipedia fame) and we are trying to become THE resource for all gamers

> I was wondering if you'd consider moving over to wikia now that you're going to might have less time with your studies. As an incentive I can point to a few things that might make the move easier

> 1. We have cool new software - gaming.wikia.com lets users do more blog-like contributions in addition to wiki editing - new social networking tools on the wiki - see our test server at http://sports.box8.tpa.wikia-inc.com/index.php?title=User:[R...

> 2. We could also hire you to help moderate the strategy wiki and other wikis if you need some beer and pizza money :-)

> 3. or we could offer to pay all the hosting costs and share some of the ad impressions/revenue with u

> If nothing else, I'd love to chat by phone and get to know you better.

> Let me know if that'd be ok :-)

[wolpoli]

This is basically an offer to buy your business for $0 and we might hire you as a contractor. It's a bad deal. I mean Jimmy Wales himself wouldn't have accepted this for Wikipedia.

[Aeolun]

Ugh, this sits very close to ‘exploiting cheap labor’, and if the ads didn’t, it makes me want absolutely nothing to do with the site.

It’s so upbeat too. I can totally see someone that doesn’t know better being taken in.

[II2II]

Cripes, that sounds creepy and exploitive. I'm pretty sure it would have raised more than a few red flags in my mind, even as a teenager about to head off to college. (Granted, I was a wee bit uptight at that age.)

[karaterobot]

We would like 2 squeeze what u made until all the money runs out + underpay u :-)

[account42]

> As you may know, Wikia is founded by Jimmy Wales (of wikipedia fame)

And Jimmy should be ashamed about being involved with Fandom/Wikia. Then again, he's also not ashamed about begging from third-world people and others much less well off as himself.

[permo-w]

the way this is phrased reminds me so much of IOI from Ready Player One

[babypuncher]

The Infosphere has always been one of the best fan wikis out there, thank you for your hard work (and for not selling out to Fandom)