Meta:Transparency
history
gbf.wiki current server fees
eu front-end cache server
cost: €11.13/month
tier/provider: CX31 tier from Hetzner
purpose: frontend caching server for Europe, runs Varnish.
Asia/SEA front-end cache server
cost: $10/month
tier/provider: $10 tier from vultr
purpose: frontend caching server for Asia/SEA, runs Varnish.
NA/SA front-end cache server
cost: $10/month
tier/provider: $10 tier from vultr
purpose: frontend caching server for North America/South America
eu database server
cost: €11.13/month
tier/provider: CX31 tier from Hetzner
purpose: runs the database for the Wiki
main backend server
cost: €37.38/month
tier/provider: CX51 tier from Hetzner
purpose: the heart of the stack: MediaWiki, nginx, elasticsearch, memcached, jobrunner.
grafana/prometheus/status server
cost: €6.13/month
tier/provider: CX21 tier from Hetzner
purpose: to provide metrics for the whole stack, being able to pinpoint issues easier and faster.
route53 - dns
cost: $10~/month
tier/provider: Route53 from AWS
purpose: to be able to redirect users to the closest front-end server for the best latency, the cost is based on the number of queries so it fluctuates between $8 to $15.
Reasoning
Why run multiple front-end servers instead of just one? Why not just Cloudflare?
I was always unhappy with the experience that users outside Europe had, having a centralized server in France made the experience quite bad outside Europe.
I decided to improve the experience for everyone else in December in preparation for the roulette by adding additional front-end servers, one in Singapore and one in Los Angeles.
This improves the experience drastically for the users in those regions but also improves the flow and decreases the interruptions by splitting the traffic into 3 servers.
The reason why I opted out of Cloudflare is that the paid tiers up to Pro just don't simply cut it, for our usage cases we would need the Business tier which is already $200/month.
The Free and Pro tier limited our abilities to specifically cache certain pages which lead to way worse performance.
This page was updated 2019-12-22, fees/prices are from 2019-12-22.