How much my side-project costs to run
I've some details about how much searchmysite.net has cost over the past 6 months, and how much it may cost to keep going in future. Short summary: it is (perhaps) surprisingly expensive to run a search engine and search as a service:
https://blog.searchmysite.net/posts/searchmysite.net-the-delicate-matter-of-the-bill/
The good news is that there is a plan to try to recover the costs (without resorting to advertising).
I think it would be fair to share some numbers in this post here as well.
Key numbers from the post:
Doesn't factor in my time (over 350 hours so far). Also doesn't go into possible cost savings in any detail.
Might also be worth mentioning that the application almost certainly has an atypical resource utilisation profile - firstly it is fairly resource intensive (involving processor, memory and network heavy processes on a regular on-going basis), and secondly it uses those resources irrespective of whether anyone is actually using the application or not (I'd imagine many of the systems on IH would be CRUD style applications, and almost all most would have a direct correlation between server utilisation and popularity/usage).
That was a well written explaination of your systems, and thinking.
It is also the first time I have come across your site and I think its great.
Many thanks for the kind words. It's open source too so feel to take a look at the code.