/tech/ - technology

>>1896
You would get better answer on /q/.

To put it nice and simple, our admin change location for this exact purpose. I do not know if you're heavily hinting the website to do something shady to stay up or genuine question. Seph has be filling the community in to her situation.

If i remembered correctly it's 33 dollars a month, The administrator as moderator for everything regarding the lively hood of the website, GitHub for the development of said website. I don't know where your confusion came from but everything seems to add up here.

The lain community stay up for two main reason.
1- The dedication of the said website and the weirdness that came from some of them. Like the lainzine or some obscure lain website.
2- The history behind said website, for example Arisuchan didn't came from nowhere it as an history that goes as far from lainchan.org/.jp which all add some pretty huge population. So that why even if this website isn't as popular remain active.

I can't answer for this site but usually tiny niche sites with no ads are run by someone who already has a lot of online real estate for business or personal reasons, so putting aside one little corner for something like this is nothing.

Or they know someone with such an operation who doesn't mind donating the space.

It's not that expensive with first-world salaries in mind. Not to mention that most people interested in lain-related sites work or will work in IT, which is a well earning profession, thus donations do happen.

I don't know where you got the idea that it's self hosted, afaik both arisuchan and lainchan are on VPSes. The admin pays a company who rents them some cores, memory, storage and bandwidth from their server farm, and provides a streamlined web interface from where they can pick/install a distro, reboot, etc. Then they ssh in and do whatever. Since these companies live off this activity, they are pretty damn money efficient with it, hence it's cheap. They likely also provide services to combat malicious traffic.
That's the site. Other stuff (git, irc, etc) don't need hosting. Indeed, it does need lots of time, but volunteer mods can help out with that.

>>1896
websites that don't have many thousands of users are extraordinarily simple to run, a server could be as little as $3/usd per month and a domain name varies greatly but cheaper ones are less than $20 per year.
I live on nearly minimum wage and I'm spending roughly $50/month in total for 1 dedicated server, 3 VPS, and 4 domain names. My servers run a couple of small, light weight websites and several simple services.

>>1896
>Self hosting a domain is expensive.
I'm not self-hosting. The site is hosted on a VPS located in a datacenter in New York City.

>Dedicated hardware/server initial cost
It's $396/yr for the VPS and $36/yr for 500Gb/sec DDoS protection. There were no setup fees.

>Maintance of said hardware and backups
$0/yr. I handle backups myself.

>Electricity
$0/yr. I'm not paying for it.

>The domain name itself
I continue to renew

lainchan.jp

in addition to

arisuchan.jp

, but together they are only $98/yr.

>Personal time (doing things like blocking spammers etc)
We have been blessed with several wonderful moderators (we could always use more!) that volunteer their time doing this, but most of the moderation involves handling breaches of rules and guidelines, not deleting spam.

>Security (Opening up port 53 to who knows what, gdpr compliance etc)
$0/yr. I'm not a sysadmin, but I still know what I'm doing somewhat.
https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=arisuchan.jp

>A good internet connection + static IP
$0/yr. It's not needed.

>Arisuchan has no ads to pay for this luxury… How does it maintain such good uptime and still be safe from hackers and malware? Also if people are paying for this, why do so many small Lain sites still exist - some 20 years old? Please help my confusions.
Because I'm not hosting it on my personal hardware. I would imagine most other lain-related sites are on small VPSs (my smaller sites collectively run on a $15/yr VPS, for example) and shared hosting environments. Also I would think our community is more technically inclined and is much more likely to use an adblocker extension, alternative DNS server, or modified hosts file.

So collectively the cost of running the site is about $530/yr. I'm not wealthy, but that isn't too much of a problem. That being said that we do accept donations just as many other image boards do. However, it has been suggested in another thread that these funds be distributed among the moderation team instead of general expenses. I'll see what they think about it.

Ahh I see! Thanks for taking the time to explain all that to me. Originally I had assumed Arisuchan.jp was self hosted because I heard rumours that there was a dark web version. I never had the time to actually go looking so I wasnt sure but I remember reading Tsuki project was launched on the dark web and assumed this site might be similar. If you already had the hardware to host a .onion domain you would probably be hosting the clear versions as well. (https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-onion-service)
A lot of the smaller well hidden lain fansites though im guessing are free (geocities/tripod) or are just very cheap for whatever reasons. Still $530 per year for this site is a lot of money! it isnt as much as I originally thought but wow, you deserve a salute good sir. If everyone in the world donated that much to charity each year the world would be very different. Most people use websites "for free" without considerning who pays for them or why… It is very interesting. But i'll leave that debate for another thread ;)

>>1904
>>1904
>Ahh I see! Thanks for taking the time to explain all that to me.
You're welcome.

>Originally I had assumed Arisuchan.jp was self hosted because I heard rumours that there was a dark web version. I never had the time to actually go looking so I wasnt sure but I remember reading Tsuki project was launched on the dark web and assumed this site might be similar. If you already had the hardware to host a .onion domain you would probably be hosting the clear versions as well.
We don't have a dark web version of arisuchan, but two of the communities that merged with us have roots there.

>A lot of the smaller well hidden lain fansites though im guessing are free (geocities/tripod) or are just very cheap for whatever reasons. Still $530 per year for this site is a lot of money! it isnt as much as I originally thought but wow, you deserve a salute good sir. If everyone in the world donated that much to charity each year the world would be very different. Most people use websites "for free" without considerning who pays for them or why… It is very interesting. But i'll leave that debate for another thread ;)
I know lainzine, soykaf.org, and fauux are all hosted on Neocities so you could say that service is well liked by the lain community. I'm not a sir, but I'm also not sure I deserve the compliment. As I mentioned before, I am not paying for the hosting exclusively myself. The site receives occasional donations that I report in the donations thread.