Thank you so, so much to our Patrons. They are keeping this site up and running smoothly for everyone. We currently have three tiers, so I’m mentioning all of them so that they get a nice little notification 
@Patron_Tier1, @Patron_Tier2 and @Patron_Tier3
Each one of them is contributing a monthly fee to help out with the community’s costs. It helps a lot!
We even have a few members who have gone above and beyond and contributed way more than our highest tier.
So, as for our current server environment and costs, I’m giving a rundown below. Feel free to skip it if you’re not interested, but I do want to highlight just how much are patrons are supporting the community.
Server Hosting
We are now on the highest server hosting package in our tier - which means we should have a speedy and stable environment. The only tier higher is the enterprise tier, which starts at about $700 per month, so hopefully we don’t ever need to scale up higher 
Emails
Emails may not sound like a big deal, but Talking Sober sends out very close to 100 000 emails per month. This is everything from new users signing up to private message notifications. This is very essential for keeping the community functioning and active. An email package at this scale obviously isn’t free, so the forum is hooked into an email provider who charges monthly. We’re going to scale up on this soon as the current package is limited to 100 000 per month and we are very close to hitting that ceiling.
File Hosting
File hosting is the biggest of all the expenses for our community. This is because we are growing quite large and all files that have ever been uploaded since the forum was started three years ago are still accessible on here. These have added up to quite a large amount of storage in total. Similar to the emails, we integrate a storage provider into the website where all the files are securely stored. They charge monthly based on the amount stored and transferred. Naturally the amount they charge for the total storage increases every month as we get more and more files every month. They also charge for every time a file is downloaded, so when an image loads on a member’s app, they count that.
Again, thank you to all the patrons. They are the lifeblood of Talking Sober.
If you’d like to find out more about what a patron is, or how to become one, check out this topic: