April 2011 Pod update

Well I have been pretty busy with work and some other projects, but thought I would do a pod update. Diaspora* has been on my backburner a bit, but the Dev’s seem hard at work and I still update the code everyday to the pod.

First off I made a plea this last week for donations and got about 10, helps out thank you to those who donated, its never too late! Long term I am still not sure how to keep the site funded. I have been able to get enough random donations to pay all server costs. Flattr seems viable if people start using it, but its not very mainstream.

I am still using Clubuptime from the move back in December, I have 2 VPS machines (one large and one medium) with them and one AWS server running the url shortner. We have 15000 users on the pod. Disk space is at about 20%, the nightly backups are taking some time to run now, but I lowered the bandwith they use to push to backup servers. On bandwith we use about 25% of the max for the month, so plenty of room to grow. The machines are all openvz boxes so they are affordable but of course have limits since they share disk i/o and such, but clubuptime does not oversell their machines like crazy. I have been thinking about setting up a more solidly hosted pod on a Xen-VPS but making it a few bucks a month subscription fee.

So rough numbers are:

15000 users

3 VPS’s costing me ~$35 a month to run

Donations ~$30 a month (very up and down, usually when I throw a hint out :))

Some numbers from Piwik since I installed it on 2/8/11 till now 4/23/11

Visits: 60000

Pageviews: 300000

Looks like code wise Diaspora* is getting better and better on the server load and performance is way up. Think its still a ways off from Beta mode myself but who knows when they will go to Beta. Think it might be silly until its ready for you to install on your home computer as intended.

If I missed something just ask!

David