Just been playing around with some numbers… A typical small static website or blog could be run for $0.30-$0.40 USD/month. How does that compare with what you’re paying @mckinley@twtxt.net ? 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net I am on the “Non-Production Site” plan with NearlyFreeSpeech which means I’m limited to 1 GiB per day of bandwidth and am occasionally subjected to “low-risk tests and betas”. The implication is that there may be downtime on my site but I haven’t noticed any since April of 2020 when I began hosting with them. It’s 1 cent per day as a base cost for that plan.

I also pay $1 per gigabyte-month for storage and I am using 9.29 MiB which means I pay a little less than one cent per month. It used to be even less than that, but since I started using Git the complete Git history is stored on the server as well as the live copy of the site.

There is an additional charge of 1 cent per 44.64 “RAUs”, their measurement combining CPU and memory usage over time. On the Non-Production plan, only resources used by processes other than the Web server are counted. I don’t believe I have ever been charged for this.

Here is my billing report for 2023 so far.

To get such a low price, I am forgoing the ability to open a private support ticket. Any questions I’ve ever had were answered by the very thorough FAQ, but if one wanted that ability they could pay an additional $5 per month for a subscription membership.

I would also like to add that their entire Web portal works without JavaScript and it has all the features you would expect and more.

@prologic@twtxt.net I’m glad I could help. You’re working on a service similar to NearlyFreeSpeech in its usage-based pricing model but built around docker containers instead? It seems very useful. How will you handle payment? Will there be privacy-friendly options like Monero or cash-by-mail?

I might have a use for something like this right now, actually. I want to set up an XMPP server for a few people without giving out my home IP address. It would probably handle 20 messages per day on average. I really don’t have a use for a VPS beyond this and I would be paying for a lot more than I need.

How will ports be allocated? Web traffic can go through a reverse proxy to share ports 80 and 443, but what about other protocols? Will it be possible to request specific ports like 5222 and 5269 for XMPP?

@prologic@twtxt.net I had to do some research for this one. The answer is yes, in theory, as long as the client or server supports XEP-0368. However, this seems like the kind of thing that would be skipped by lazy implementations. I would be interested to see how this looks in practice.

SRV records are used in the XMPP core specification to determine the domain and port to which clients and servers (for s2s connections) should connect. XEP-0368 is an extension to the spec detailing how servers and clients should handle SRV records in relation to TLS connections. It says that the “Client or server MUST set SNI TLS extension to the JID’s domain part.”

As an aside, SRV records alone can be used, in theory, to change the default port used in c2s or s2s connections. If the ports were assigned randomly from the hosting provider, they could be specified in the SRV records and everything would hopefully just work. Again, I don’t know how well this is supported in practice.

@prologic@twtxt.net Protocols using TLS could probably share ports via SNI multiplexing. If you’re using a plain text protocol or can’t use SNI for some reason, you might have the option to get exclusive use of a random port for an extra fee. You could maybe even request specific ports for a larger fee on a first come, first serve basis. One IPv4 address can go a long way.

Virtual hosting is another reason why it’s so cheap to run my website. NFS puts dozens of websites on each IPv4 address.