Running thesession.org
I realised that it’s been quite a while since I posted an update on the financial details of running thesession.org for anyone that’s interested.
Last time was the end of 2016:
https://thesession.org/discussions/40065
Before that it was the middle of 2015:
https://thesession.org/discussions/37657
Here’s how the costs are looking right now every month for The Session:
$48 Hosting and backups with https://www.digitalocean.com/
$50 Email newsletter and transactional emails with https://postmarkapp.com/
$ 8 DNS management with https://dnsimple.com
$12.50 Email account with https://www.fastmail.com/
$ 0 Version control with https://github.com/
$ 0 Secure certificate with https://letsencrypt.org/
----
$118.50 total monthly costs
That’s good news! It means the monthly costs have come *down* since I last gave an update. That’s mostly due to getting off Mailchimp which was by far the most expensive aspect (I’m now using Postmark, which I was already using for transactional email: they started offering bulk—for the newsletter—a little while back). Also, Github changed their pricing structure so I can have a free account there and still get the benefits of having private repos. And it’s worth noting that even though the cost for hosting at Digital Ocean looks unchanged, I’m actually getting *more* bang for my buck now—more memory and CPU for the same price.
I’m posting these numbers because The Session is supported by donations from you all, and I thought you’d like to see where your money goes. Once again, I am very, very grateful to anyone who has ever made a donation of any size. I’m especially thankful for those of you who have set up repeat monthly donations—that helps stabilise the numbers.
As a reminder, you can donate—either one-off or repeat—through Paypal, or you can become a supportor on Patreon. The details are all here:
https://thesession.org/donate
One of the reasons I haven’t posted an update in a while is that I’m breaking my own rules here. This discussion doesn’t have anything to do with Irish music. My apologies.
I really want to keep non-music updates to a minium here. I’ll post the occassional technical update here when it involves a new feature, but I try to confine the geeky details to my own website. Still, for anyone who’s interested in the technical side of things, I’ve made a blog for The Session:
https://blog.thesession.org/
That’s grabbing anything I’ve tagged on my own blog with “thesession” and displaying those posts in one place. There’s an RSS feed if you want to subscribe:
https://adactio.com/journal/tags/thesession/rss
Again, thank you so much for your donations towards keeping the site running—I really, really appreciate it.
And again, sorry about clogging up the discussions section with an update that isn’t relevant to Irish traditional music.
But while I’ve got this discussion started, how about we use this thread to document any features you wish The Session had?
I’m not saying I’ll be able to build everything you might want, but I’d really love to hear what you think would be useful additions.
For example, I’m toying with the idea of having a “record” option for every tune setting, where you could record a clip of yourself playing that setting. I don’t think this would be for public sharing—more like your own private library of recordings (it might even use “local storage” so the files are only stored on your own device rather than on a server). What do you think? Might that be useful?
Anyway, let me know if you have any ideas you want to share.