TL;DR: Hosting a decently popular web application like Dyson Sphere Blueprints is very expensive and any amount of contribution would go a long way.

Hello there!

My name is Gabriel. I have been a developer for the past 15 years and working in the web industry for the past 8.
I am also a gamer through and through, which is why most of my projects are video game related and I am really passionate about those.

For the past year I've been developing and maintaining two projects:

• Dyson Sphere Blueprints
• ChroniconDB

I am working on these projects in my spare time and covering all the hosting expenses by myself.
Although this is something I am glad I am doing and I don't mind at all, I didn't expect the success of Dyson Sphere Blueprints.

Currently, Dyson Sphere Blueprints boasts:

• 1350 Users created
• 4200 Blueprints (2676 Public blueprints)
• 3008 Unique Visitors a day
• On average 80 users per minute
• 161k Requests served per day
• 150GB of data served per day

These are amazing numbers and I am very grateful to the community for that ♥️.
But those numbers also mean extra hosting expenses that are starting to get out of hand.
One of the big factors is that the website is truly international, we have users from all around the world, and more than half of our users are from China, the other (little-less-than) half coming mostly from the US and Europe. This means that there isn't ever any downtime for our servers that'd help to reduce the cost and it also means that to be able to provide as best an experience as I could for our asians brethren I've had to setup CDNs around the world to try and reduce their loading times (the servers are closer to the US/Europe).

I've tried to optimise the code as much as I could to reduce the footprint on our servers, and even though I know I can do better and will try to continue to improve on that, I feel like it's time to move to a more expensive hosting plan.
We are currently stretching the one we use very thin, especially in the RAM department (this is what I wake up to every morning).

I am not planning on adding any form of ads to the website nor will I ever do so, and I know the site has been getting quite slow for the past week or so because of the heavy traffic we are experiencing. If I want the website experience to remain pleasant (a.k.a: not slow) I'll need to bump the hosting up and this will definitely be more expensive.

As a reference here are the costs I am currently covering by myself for the current website:

• Application Hosting: 14€/month
• Database Hosting: 9€/month
• Image Hosting: 1-10€/month (depending on traffic)
• Content Delivery Network: 50-60€/month (depending on traffic)

This amounts to about 80€/month that I have to expend. I could cut back and remove the CDN which would make the experience worse for anyone not in Europe (longer loading times), but even without it that'd still be around 30€/month.

And that's just now. If I want to be able to handle the traffic reliably I have to change my Application Hosting plan and it'd cost 70€/month just for that.
That would bring us to:

• Application Hosting: 70€/month
• Database Hosting: 9€/month
• Image Hosting: 1-10€/month (depending on traffic)
• Content Delivery Network: 50-60€/month (depending on traffic)

This would bring the cost of running DSB to about 150€/month which is... quite expensive. Even if I removed the CDN as I said, it'd still be too much.
At the time I am barely able to cover the current costs without it hindering my life too much but I don't know what the future holds.

And this is why I need your help. If even 2% of our users gave 2€ a month it would pretty much cover most of the costs which would be amazing.

If you've read up to here, I thank you a lot and hope some of you will be able to help even the tiniest bit.

Cheers and love ♥️