FA+
Shop
Other Places to Find Me
a year ago
While FurAffinity’s recent GoFundMe for the site and for Dragoneer’s final expenses has had a remarkable amount of success, it’s understandable that some folks are still concerned about the long-term future of the site. At $20K per month, the GoFundMe will currently provide about four months of continuing support for FA. Beyond that, I imagine there will be heroic efforts to keep the site going, both for sake of the community and to honor Dragoneer’s legacy.
However, it’d be foolish to not make contingency plans. Some day, FurAffinity will close. Whether that happens in a few months or in several years, people will need other ways to keep in touch, share their work, and otherwise participate in the furry fandom. The same is true for any website run for free by volunteers. Very few things on the Internet last forever.
While all of my contact information is on my Linktree, the best places to find me are Mastodon and SoFurry. I’ll continue to use FurAffinity—it’d be absurd to leave the site when 75% of my readers are here—but I’d recommend following me on other sites just in case it becomes necessary.
As for Dragoneer what his life meant, I don’t have anything to add to what others have phrased more passionately and eloquently than I ever could.
However, it’d be foolish to not make contingency plans. Some day, FurAffinity will close. Whether that happens in a few months or in several years, people will need other ways to keep in touch, share their work, and otherwise participate in the furry fandom. The same is true for any website run for free by volunteers. Very few things on the Internet last forever.
While all of my contact information is on my Linktree, the best places to find me are Mastodon and SoFurry. I’ll continue to use FurAffinity—it’d be absurd to leave the site when 75% of my readers are here—but I’d recommend following me on other sites just in case it becomes necessary.
As for Dragoneer what his life meant, I don’t have anything to add to what others have phrased more passionately and eloquently than I ever could.
Did you know you can support me on SubscribeStar Adult? 
I doubt the site actually costs 20k to run in normal business, that'd prob. be unsustainable with the current model.
Course that might also be including costs to pay actual developers and stuff to work on the site but who knows, either way it's pretty ridiculous and I'd love to see an actual cost breakdown to know where they are blowing all that money.
As for the price, my last full-time job was as a software solution architect, so I'd like to think I'm qualified to speak on the subject. For a site the size of FA, $20K is at least plausible if you're self-hosting everything, which seems to be the case. Meow.social is a Mastodon instance run on bare metal, and even with a discount from the hosting provider and a server admin who knows what he's doing, it costs several hundred Euros per month to run. FurAffinity is easily forty times the size of that, so $20K is at least in the ballpark of reasonable.
To do some quick back-of-the-envelope math: Let's assume the average submission to FA is 1 MB in size, gets 1,000 views, and the site receives 10,000 submissions per day. That means the site is using about 9.5 TB per day just to show off submissions. AWS charges $0.05 per GB of data transfer to the Internet once you've used 150 TB/month. Therefore, it'd cost almost $500 per day just in bandwidth charges to display the site's submissions. If they're spending over $15K/month in bandwidth and the total cost to run the site is $20K, I'm impressed at how inexpensive the rest of their tech stack is.