I've been asked what the €300 each month actually buys. €236 of it rents the smallest possible rack unit at datacenter Nedzone in Steenbergen, with the following specifications:

Rackspace: 15U private
Access: 24/7 (biometric access control)
Power supply: 2x 220V redundant
Max power usage: 7A
Included bandwidth: 10Mbit
Connection: 2x 100Mbit copper ethernet redundant
IP Addresses: 16 x IPv4, 16 x IPv6

Power usage is not included and costs €0.1815 per Kwh. BOINCstats uses ~17.1Kwh per day, that's €3.10, so on average €93 per month.

The other question is, why not moving to the cloud, it's supposed to be much cheaper.
Although I like the cloud for ease of maintenance, the hardware needs for BOINCstats makes the cloud actually very expensive. I've done some calculations at Amazone and Microsoft and the cost per month would more than double.

Be worth pointing out that, that cost only covers running the servers - not the actual cost of purchasingrenting or maintaining the servers (ie swapping a hard drive).

Thanks for detailing the running costs for Boincstats Willy.

What do you think of sending an email to the registered Boincstats users explaining the costs involved in running your service and asking for support? Like the annual fundraising email we receive from other projects sometimes. If you send out such an email once a year I guess the users will not feel bothered and would donate quite willingly (well, some of them or hopefully, a lot of them). I think a lot of Boincstats users could use such an additional kick in their ... (me included )

To reinforce what Willy said, when the issue of moving datacenters arose a few months ago which would have necessitated a colocation fee that PrimeGrid couldn't afford, I did some research into cloud services such as Amazon and Rackspace and other similar companies.

Most of them aren't all that cheap. Cloud servers have lots of flexibility, which is great for a new web enterprise since you can start small (and inexpensive) and rapidly expand if needed. But that flexibility comes at a price. In Amazon's case, it's not just the cost of the servers: they charge you independently for everything, and nickel and dime you to death. Even worse than the cost, it's almost impossible to reliably predict what your costs actually will be.

The second problem is configuration: most cloud providers offer pre-configured servers with specific characteristics. If that doesn't exactly match your needs, you either end up with a server with less of some resource than you really need, or you end up paying for resources you don't need. For example, you may need lots of processing power, but very little ram, but you'll probably end up paying for tons of ram on a big fast server with lots of CPU.

Fortunately for PrimeGrid, Rytis had experience using a cloud hosting company in Lithuania that's much less expensive than a lot of its competitors. Even better, it allows you to configure your servers exactly the way you want, dialing in the number of CPUs, memory, disk, and bandwidth that you need. For PrimeGrid, this worked well as we had fairly old servers, this hosting company is able to fill our needs, and we could actually save money while increasing performance and reliability by making this transition. Compared to moving our old servers to the new datacenter and continuing to share a rack with BOINCstats, we now have much faster servers, redundant servers (in different datacenters so we also have site redundancy), RAID disks to protect against disk failures, and it costs less than sharing the rack would have cost.

But that company is not the proverbial "silver bullet". There's a limit to how large a server you can get, there's limitations on bandwidth, and various other restrictions that go along with not having 100% control over the servers. It's not a good match for everyone or for every application. There's certainly other places that offer far more capacity and features, but they're also several times more expensive. This worked for PrimeGrid -- but it wouldn't necessarily work for other applications, such as BOINCStats.

I checked the current pricing on Amazon and Google cloud and the estimate for the cost per month is just ridiculous. This means that BOINCstats is still not moving to the cloud as is simply won't save money, it's actually at least three times more expensive. Unless of course we are happy with just one update each day and a slower website.

As example an estimate from Google for the update server:

That's a virtual server with 32 threads and 16GB of RAM (current update server has 8 cores ans 32GB of ram). DOn't need 32 threads, but threads and RAM is linked to each other. I do need a lot of RAM though. 16GB will probably not be enough to run multiple updates at the same time (now user, team, country, host and challenge updates all run in parallel).

Maybe somebody knows a reliable cloud provider with down to earth prices?

Try Mythic-Beasts or DigitalOcean.

Azure's pretty cheap, Troy Hunt has done a number of posts about his site - Have I been pwned? which gets some massive hits, about how efficient it is, still you'll be streaming data 24/7 rather then ad-hoc like he does.

I've heard bytemark is pretty good, but never used them

I suggest that we approach Henry the Admin of BU to fund BOINCStats monthly costs ongoing. Bitcoin Utopia funds worthwhile causes of their choosing. The funds is created by the project users. I would much prefer to support a project that supports BOINCStats than say "The Colonization of Mars".

Maybe I posted in the wrong thread - if so, I'm sorry - please "put it where it belongs".

That said, here is my (perhaps stupid) question:

How can one donate for more than one month (each 300€) in one transaction?
Let's say 400€.
If I select the month July (already filled to >48%), does the rest spill over into the next (August) month?

I am pretty sure Willy keeps a close eye on the incoming donations! You can donate any amount you want. Some are direct shown in the progress bar, some after a few days.

It doesn't spill over automatically since it's usually just a few euros. If I see a big donation I manually take care of the dividing.

THAT is the answer I wanted to hear! THANKS for responding so quickly.

Just tried to donate a "small" amount.
As Paypal is the only offered way to "transfer", I had to give up my intention, since they want a "secure code" in order to start the transaction using my credit card.
This "secure code" is new to me. After contacting my bank, I had to understand that in order to use this paying procedure (i.e. paypal), I would have to "open an online bank account".

This does not comply with our/my handling of payments for "security" reasons (having to disclose private data plus fees for the bank online side).

Do you have any other "method" of payment?

Have a nice day ...

Bank transfer and Bitcoin is possible.

As far as I know it's not possible for me to receive funds on my creditcard.

That's not the code on the back of the card?

Nope, that is the CVC (MASTERCARD) ... three digits long ... easy to 'crunch', that is why paypal etc. ask your bank directly online for a secure code to complete the transaction!
Which (the secure code) you must use (enter online for each Transaction). It implies that you are registered for online banking at your bank - which I am not.
As far as I know this code is renewed (one-time code) for each transaction. There are different methods how you get the new code for started transaction.
One is is getting the code per SMS on your cell phone - another per e-mail.
Some banks give you a code that stays valid for as many transactions you make.
Some other banks allow transactions without a secure code - but the number is getting smaller (to much fraud going on)!

MASTERCARD CVC Card Validation Code
VISA CVV Card Verificatiob Code
Others i.e. call it CSC, CCV or KPN

I try to avoid registering my personal information wherever I can. I'm one of those "idiots".

Maybe I'm wearing the wrong reading glasses, but I can't find the bank transfer data neede to donate to BOINC!?

Please give me a hint where to find it (IBAN etc.).

Nothing wrong with your glasses, they are not publicly shown on BOINCstats as they are easily abused. I'll send you a PM.

Interesting, I haven't run into that... I do use my credit card with PayPal, but it's associated with my account (backup/secondary funding source) so maybe that's why I don't have to do that.