I’m no developer or an expert when it comes to this subject, so please bear with me here…
A few months ago when I installed Discourse (I had to uninstall it for the time being, but will return some time next year) I noticed that my daily backups were very small (or course, I was just building/designing it and had no members, so no real traffic and/or new content). Each backup would take around 20MB.
I asked ChatGPT how much I would pay per month for a backup service for that particular case (I know that with an active community, the backup size will quickly increase, but this is just to be used as an example).
On AWS I would be expected to pay around $0.45-$0.60 a month for those daily 20MB backups (so 600MB a month). Is that a realistic cost or am I missing something?
Then, I asked about BackBlaze B2. To my surprise I was told that they use something compatible with S3 (before asking ChatGPT about it I thought S3 was something that only AWS used, like the name of their service - which also is -, but it seems that it’s more like a “protocol” that other companies can use. Interesting…). I was told that BackBlaze has a flat fee of $0.005 per GB per month.
So for those 20MB backup a day (600MB a month), the estimated monthly costs would be:
- AWS S3: $0.45-$0.60
- Backblaze B2: $0.15-$0.30.
Is this a realistic scenario for that amount of space?
I just want to have a good understanding of how things work (and cost), so I can then adapt to other amounts of data as the community grows.
I remember seeing the S3 option in the Discourse settings (when I thought it was just related to AWS - which always seemed super confusing to a non expert like myself). So, that means I can use BackBlaze B2, correct?
Another question: if I’m paying with PayPal, I also have to pay their fees which is like 30 cents per transaction + whatever % of the total amount paid. So, I asked ChatGPT if both companies allowed me to deposit a certain amount once and then let that be used as credit, avoiding monthly fees. I was told that they do. Can anyone confirm this?
After doing some more research, I found this other topic and the OP said they have a 3GB backup, while another person said they are at 8GB. I believe I successfully created a system where I was downloading it directly to my Dropbox (I uninstalled Discourse a few months ago, so I can’t confirm it 100%, but I believe it was working properly), so my question is: should I go through the hassle of setting yet another service for backups? How big can a backup really be if 99.9% of it is just text and occasionally some images that are already being optimized by Discourse itself? Since I have my own backup disks with daily backups (and snapshots), I don’t have to keep all backups on Dropbox anyway, and since they have 30 day history, even if something goes wrong after deleting a backup file, I still have 30 days to recover it.
Any help on this subject is greatly appreciated. Thank you!