Transparency On The Future of ATS

originally posted by: Asktheanimals
ATS has so much collected wisdom , informational threads on every subject imaginable, art, poetry, stories, etc. What a giant shame it would be to lose. I would hope it's pages could be archived in some permanent fashion. Let's hope it doesn't come to that. whatever comes it would be nice to have as much membership involvement as possible. I think many here feel a deep investment and would do what they could to see it continue.

Why wouldn't the pages be archived in some permanent fashion ?

originally posted by: SkepticOverlord

originally posted by: Hypntick
As others have asked, what are the operating costs annually?

Right now, no one is getting any profit payments, so it's cheap.

But to revive it as a business would require a sustained revenue model to fund infrastructure and code base improvements -- even before we look to alternative revenue methods. In order to afford the necessary expenditures, which would be months-long, we'd need a minimum of $25,000/month. That's not suddenly happening with donations or subscriptions.

And... these are "friends and family" prices from talented developers I've come to know well.


For those in the know... consider the cloud datastore costs for this: our entire content database instance is over 50GB, with an average of 56 queries a second... with more than 3TB of supporting (images) files. What would that cost on AWS?

3TB of images in s3 (depending on GET frequency) should come out to something around 150$/month. I'd imagine youre also paying for cloudflare or cloudfront (possibly both) for caching/proxying.

Do you currently use EC2 instances? On prem box?
What size are your RDS instances? How much bandwith are you moving monthly?

Its very easy to bleed money in AWS, but there are tons of resources out there that will help you in the right direction.


3TB of what I assume are user added resources, might be time to archive (s3 glacier is stupid cheap) or outright start pruning assets

I feel sick now... This site and many people on it have seen me through good times and bad. I can honestly say if it weren't for this site I would not be where I am today. I'm trying not to cry.

a reply to: SkepticOverlord

Yeah ballpark estimates on an instance that would support (my best guess) is in the 4.5k per month range. Not accounting for dev time, security services, etc. Even at a rock bottom price of $5 a month for a subscription model you'd need 50k folks on that.

I hope if nothing else a buyer can be found, however if not some sort of archive would be nice. Then again, we're talking expenses as well, which a donation campaign may in fact fund.

As I said, it's a damn shame.

a reply to: DoctorBluechip

If there is no money to keep the lights on to post new content, how much money do you think is there to serve up old content?

Or if your car is out of gas, can you drive it to the gas station?

a reply to: Ahabstar

You can get out and push.
I know this because I've done it.

a reply to: Phage

But that isn’t driving is it? More of a push and steer. And ATS is more like a double trailer semi than a Mitsubishi Mirage...

a reply to: Ahabstar

My girlfriend was driving. I was pushing.

And it was a Honda Civic.


It was also downhill most of the way.

How about the more conspiracy minded of us set up shop on a different free bulletin board service or something like that? By conspiracy minded I mean *not* politics. Maybe even set up an archive of the best threads in the UFO and paranormal forums?

It’d be a shame to never read Astro’s thread again or the references in the others about the green lady

I would give up my weekly PEZ refills and cast that money towards ATS
•Stage 1: Shock and denial
•Stage 2: Anger
•Stage 3: Bargaining
•Stage 4: Depression and detachment
•Stage 5: Acceptance
Say it ain't so..............

a reply to: Phage

Did it too many times in the Ranger alone due to a dead battery to pop the clutch. No wonder I have heart problems years later.

a reply to: Ahabstar

So if look up an old ATS thread right now , you're saying it will cost the business for me to read it ?

And if I do so after closure , Google will still want to charge someone to serve it to me ?
And if you don't pay , I don't get to read th content ?

What you're saying is that everything created here will be wiped into darkness because there is no money , but to pay who ?

a reply to: SkepticOverlord

Well damn.

Dammit. Y'all have no idea how bad I am at making friends. I don't wanna start over again from scratch.

a reply to: Hypntick

4k for a db instance? Where the hell is that and how are they still in business

a reply to: Ahabstar

So it doesn't get lost ...
Who do you have to pay to serve up old content ??

Some sort of internet archive ? maybe ? en.wikipedia.org...