A slightly belated Happy New Year to you all, and a quick update, one year into this third reading of the diary.
This has been the first time I’ve experimented with offering the ability to contribute financially to the site, via the Ko-fi page, and I’ve been surprised and honoured by the response. 183 people have contributed something over the past year, 21 of whom are contributing something each month via subscription. Thank you so much!
There’s absolutely no requirement to pay anything to use this site, and it’ll always stay that way. But I really appreciate the support, which more than covers the site’s costs.
Costs
Each month the costs are roughly:
| Item | Company | Cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Web and database server | Mythic Beasts | £40 | Also hosts two other, less popular, websites |
| Daily diary emails | Buttondown | £23 | |
| @samuelpepys on Mastodon | Heroku | £4 | |
| Media file hosting | AWS S3 | £0 | A fraction of the £1 I spend hosting several things there |
| Discussion group | Groups.io | £0 | Should cost £21 but we have an old, free plan |
| Transactional emails | Sendgrid | £0 | e.g. password reset emails |
| Web analytics | Cloudflare | £0 | |
| Code hosting and deployment | GitHub | £0 | |
| Uptime monitoring | StatusCake | £0 | |
| Error logging | Sentry | £0 | |
| Total | £67 |
Monthly subscription contributions, minus Ko-fi and Stripe fees, total roughly £80 per month, so everything is covered, with room to spare, which is wonderful.
Some stats
Over the past 30 days the site has had nearly 64,000 “visits” and 112,000 page views. 37% of visits were from the UK and 27% from the US, with South Korea the next most popular at 6%.
2,792 annotations/comments were posted across the site during 2023.
There are 1,336 people receiving the diary entries by email every day.
The discussion group has 645 members and 468 emails were posted to it during 2023.
@samuelpepys on Mastodon currently has 5,146 followers, helped by a few waves of desertions from Twitter/X. I might make this work on Bluesky if it stops requiring invites to sign up. I’m not sure about Threads.
Thanks again
If there’s anything else you’d like to know, do ask in the comments below. Otherwise, thanks again to all of you, and may you have excellent and peaceful 2024s and 1661s.
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