Support Dyson Sphere Blueprints ★ Go to the wall of fame ★

Why do we need your support? The short version

First of all, thank you for using this application and being part of the community.
You are amazing.

As some of you might be aware, hosting a decently popular web application such as Dyson Sphere Blueprints has a cost, and a pretty substiantial one at that: one needs to pay for web hosting, database hosting, image storage space and other things like a CDN to improve loading times.
This can add up quickly and we are reaching a tipping point where it's starting to cost a bit too much money and it's gonna cost even more if I want the website to continue working properly with the traffic increase.
The website is stretching thin on its current "cheap" web hosting plan and upgrading it would be the next sensible step. A sensible yet expensive step.

There will never be any ads on Dyson Sphere Blueprint but, at the same time, I need help covering the costs, and am thus making this page to ask for your help in maintaining Dyson Sphere Program up and running properly.
If you wish to support Dyson Sphere Blueprints, may it be by tipping me a beer (the only fuel a developer needs) once or sponsoring Dyson Sphere Blueprints through a monthly donation, know that your contribution whatever the amount will be of great help, and I would be most grateful.

Why do we need your support? The long version (with some numbers!)

Hello there!
My name is Gabriel. I have been a developer for the past 15 years and working in the web industry for the past 8.
I am also a gamer through and through, which is why most of my projects are video game related and I am really passionate about those.

Dyson Sphere Blueprints is a labor of heart and I am really happy to see so many people enjoying it. I am so grateful for that. Thank you.
But the thing is: I am working on this project in my spare time and covering all the hosting expenses by myself. Although this is something I am glad I am doing and don't mind at all, I didn't expect the success of Dyson Sphere Blueprints.

Currently, Dyson Sphere Blueprints boasts:

2200 Users created
5050 Blueprints (about half are public blueprints)
8000 Unique Visitors a day
On average 200 users per minute
468K Requests served per day
150GB of data served per day

These are amazing numbers and I am very grateful to the community for that ❤️
But those numbers also mean extra hosting expenses that are a bit on the... high side.
One of the big factors is that the website is truly international, we have users from all around the world, and more than half of our users are from China, the other (little-less-than) half coming mostly from the US and Europe. This means that there isn't ever any downtime for our servers that'd help to reduce the cost and it also means that to be able to provide as best an experience as I could for our asians brethren I've had to setup CDNs around the world to try and reduce their loading times (the servers are closer to the US/Europe).

I've tried to optimise the code as much as I could to reduce the footprint on our servers, and even though I know I can do better and will try to continue to improve on that, I have limited time on hand and a migration to a less expensive host would be very arduous at the moment.

I am not planning on adding any form of ads to the website nor will I ever do so, but if I want the website experience to remain pleasant (a.k.a: not slow) I need to keep using a decent hosting plan, and this is definitely expensive.

As a reference here are the costs I am currently covering by myself for the current website:

Current server and hosting costs
Application Dyno	50€ / month
Worker Dyno	25€ / month
Database Hosting	9€ / month
Image Hosting	1-5€ / month (depending on traffic)
Content Delivery Network (CDN) and Cache	1-5€ / month (depending on traffic)

This amounts to about 100€ / month that I have to expend. I could cut back and go back to a less expensive plan, but we all know that would mean a slower site and worse experience for you all.

And this is why I need your help. If even a small number of our users gave 2€ a month it would pretty much cover most of the costs, which would be amazing.

If you've read up to here, I thank you a lot and hope some of you will be able to help even the tiniest bit.

Cheers and love ❤️