Friday, August 20, 2010

The monthly bill

Has anyone ever wondered what RadioReference's monthly costs are to provide our services? I figured I would take a moment to share with the community what we pay each month in hosting expenses. We obviously have other expenses, like taxes, payroll, commissions, etc, but our largest expense is our Web hosting hosts (servers, bandwidth, etc).

Our primary Web hosting partner is Amazon Web Services, which provides a fantastic cloud computing model which is critical for our ability to scale up and down based on demand, and pay only for what we use. We have also partnered with ServerBeach to provide a server external to Amazon Web Services for mail and monitoring activities.

Below is our latest invoice for the month of July's hosting on Amazon Web Services... (click the picture to see the invoice full size)

That's right, right about $8,285.00. We also paid ServerBeach approximately $200 for a server hosted with them. That means on a typical busy month we are looking at ~ $8500/month in hosting and bandwidth costs.

How does all this break down?

- $2700/month in server costs (web, database, archive, audio, and management servers)
- $1300/month in storage costs (audio archives, backups, databases, files etc)
- $4500/month in bandwidth (all those audio feeds)

Hopefully this gives a good perspective as to what it costs to run a high traffic, bandwidth intensive Web property.

Next up... our technical architecture. Ever wondered how many servers we have, what they do, and what software we run? Stay tuned!

20 comments:

Katerina Papadopoulos said...

WOW! Thanks! I love the service.

Jenny and Guide Dog somebodyorother said...

Wow! That's a lot of money each month. But you guys provide a really good service/website. I have a quick question though. I live in Wichita, Ks. On my iPhone on your site I can only get a feed for the south and west sides. On my MacBook on the same site I can get a city feed. Why is there feeds on the iPhone than on the Mac and other way round? At any rate I love your website. :-) It opens up the world to me and it's dead awesome. :-) Thank you.
Do you have some sort of membership program? Like where you can pay for six months or a year's worth of service? I'm thinking so because I think I saw something about it on your site but that was an age ago.

annemaccat said...

Do ads on the site and paid memberships cover those cost? If not, what does? I have been curious about this. Thank you for sharing "The monthly bill" with us. It makes me appreciate even more all that you and everyone else at Radio Reference does.

Forest Ranger tom said...

So how is it paid by? Where do the funds come from to pay for all this?

Unknown said...

Hello, Lindsay

I would like to thank you for the services you provide.
I have my own scanner but the signal i receive is terrible. So.... I fire up RadioReference and it is all clear. :)

Lady Puppet said...

wow wee thats a lot i`d say! And who helps pay?

Lady Puppet said...

yikes! thats a lot of $$$ and who helps you pay that?

Anonymous said...

Very Informative. Thank you.

Ben LaGuire said...

Very interesting! Love the behind the scenes look at this kind of stuff.

AndrewCCM said...

Love this kind of info. Thanks for posting. Proud to be a RR feed provider.

Anonymous said...

$8500 a month to run the business, but how much are you taking in monthly?

Anonymous said...

Wow, not cheap, but a great website.

Couldn't get along without it.

Started scanning in 1958 when there was no where to go for freqs and information.

Bob Bergg KD8DKX

nate said...

Thats a good amount of money !!

Anonymous said...

The site is - without question - the most valuable resource on the net for scanning and communications info.
Please do whatever is needed to keep the site financially solvent!

Pete Miller
W1AMJ
Prospect CT

911 and the Randomness.. said...

Holy catfish that's a lot of $$$!!
This site is amazing though! I scan around to listen and learn from other agencies.

How does the bill get paid??

Deerme said...

Instead of wow and great work why not donate to the site or cause and help him out.!

David NJ said...

Looks like you might want to use more reserved instances.

The bill will also pop up starting with the Nov bill for the data transfer in cost. Looks like it is 0.10/GB so that would have been another $1,385 based on the posted bill.

If the majority of the bandwidth cost is live streaming, are some protocols more efficient then others? Maybe eliminating the less efficient ones could save some $$.

Anonymous said...

I know it costs but in my area they are always offline. They have been offling for several months. I'm in Ontario, Canada and if Muskoka would be online I sure would help out with the costs.

wifi radio said...

Do you have some sort of membership program? Like where you can pay for six months or a year's worth of service? I'm thinking so because I think I saw something about it on your site but that was an age ago.

Gecko said...

Seems Lindsay has only told half the story. You don't need to be an accountant to know there is an income side of this equation.