I've found that, by and large, you get what you pay for with hosting.

I'm obviously using a VM, as I can't afford a hosted server (nor have the time to maintain a colo), and I opted for Linode after much careful research. Mainly because I know several people, who's opinions I trust implicitly, who recommend them highly.

I've currently got the "Linode 1536" (which used to be something like the "Linode 1280" before they increased the RAM in all their machines a few months back for free), so about $60 a month. It's mostly for the storage, as I rarely use even 50% of the bandwidth allowance. Once I get the wotmania archive fully transferred across, the hosting costs will go up to accomodate the full size (currently somewhere in the region of 30Gb, I believe).

I currently expect to sell about 25-30 premium accounts between now and the end of the month (when the current free period expires) and another 25-30 across the course of the next 12 months. Which should nicely cover the cost of hosting and the odd foreign postage for competition winners, should the need arise.

It would of course be wonderful if I sold a lot more of those premium accounts (which, as I make clear on the donations page, would still be invested back into the site; it's donations that are the way to go for people who want to contribute something to me directly), but I suspect that even 60 accounts could be rather optimistic.



Anyway. That transparent enough for you?