Costs
Running this website is not free. Here are my estimated costs so far (last updated by hand 2022-02-27):
- One month of Google Colab Pro+ to run the AI that generates the images: $50.
They actually cut me off after eleven 24-hour periods into the month for hitting a GPU usage limit and, being a Google Product, customer support is pretty bad.
- Lifetime PHP Storm license: $89.
This is the IDE I chose for this project. If you don't know what an IDE is, think "Photoshop for programming". It's a tool that helps keep me organized and efficient. This one is actually really nice.
- Lifetime InSync license: $50.
This is some software I bought to help me automatically sync the AI-generated images down out of Google Drive and then push them to Digital Ocean Spaces. I dig it.
- Digital Ocean Spaces: $5.
There is a five dollar monthly cost for Digital Ocean's competitor to Amazon S3. This is where the images are stored for use by the website. Their content-delivery-network means my web servers can focus on running the code and not get bogged down serving the image files.
- Digital Ocean Basic AMD Droplet: $6.
Right now the site runs on one six-dollars per month "Basic AMD" server from Digital Ocean. That gets me one gigabyte of memory, a decent processor, and a 25gb nvme drive. This tiny machine can actually handle around 300 constant simultaneous users without crapping out, so I'm pretty impressed!
In the future I can divide the work onto multiple machines if needed and scale those machines up if needed.
Total out of pocket after 9 months: $288.
It's not all just raw expense though. I'm sure I will find further value in InSync and I know I'll have future use for PHP Storm. Digital Ocean Spaces pulls double duty powering my pet photography website. Also thanks to this project I learned a ton of new skills:
- Infrastructure as code with Ansible
- Nginx web server configuration (I'd only ever used Apache2 before)
- More skill with HAProxy
- A better understanding of Redis performance and backup orchestration
- Datadog Synthetics and Real User Monitoring