With just 12 hours remaining in 20161, it seems like an opportune time to examine the first year of 10Centuries v4 via the only metric that I really have available: raw numbers. All in all, some of these numbers are quite nice, while others could certainly be better. Transparency is important to me, so if there are any questions about these numbers or if you would like to see some others, just let me know. So long as the information will not infringe on anybody's privacy, I can make them available.
So without further delays, let's take a look at how 2016 panned out.
Total expenses for the year worked out to 240,732円, which is roughly $1500 USD more than had been budgeted. This overrun was a result of a move from Japanese servers to the more expensive — but more flexible — Amazon platform, as well as theme licences. In November I said that the service would move back to Japan, but this has been postponed given the amount of prepayment that has already gone into the Amazon accounts. I could try and sell the partial-reserved instance rates, but the taxation complexity behind such a thing just doesn't seem worth it. For the time being, 10C will remain on Amazon's service hosted from their Oregon data centre.
Income was an incredible 96,410円, which has been received from 19 accounts. I really want to thank everyone for the help and encouragement with this project and, so long as I can keep costs down in 2017, the service should break even. The budget for 2017 is going to be set at 90,000円, just as it was for 2016, with 80% going to operational costs and 20% for theme development.
A total of 116 accounts were made in 2016, 31 of which have been abandoned2 and 5 that have been deleted. I don't have an exit survey when people choose to delete their account, so there is no information as to why people choose to delete their accounts.
Not including the posts imported from other systems, here is the breakdown of items that people have put on 10Centuries in 2016:
- Social Posts ⇢ 78,278
- Blog Posts ⇢ 631
- ToDo Items ⇢ 480
- Podcasts ⇢ 49
- Pages ⇢ 13
The average length of a social post is 130.56 characters, and the average blog post is 692.11 characters. While 49 podcasts have been uploaded for this year, the most popular podcast is actually an archive of Patrick Rhone's Enough Podcast, which ended production three years ago. There are roughly 40 episode downloads for this show every day, and it's by far the single largest contributor to the total bandwidth transfer.
4,892,301 unique visits have been registered across all sites with 28,810,914 page requests by browsers and just over 30-million page views by bots and other automated systems. The API has received 71,903,942 requests. On the development side, updates have been released on 217 of 366 days, and the database grows by 1,808KB a day.
Uptime for the project has been 6 hours 23 minutes shy of perfect for the year.
For the most part, I'm happy with how the system has been able to deliver so much despite the minimal hardware. 10Centuries uses three EC2 instances 90% of the time and does occasionally require a fourth to handle traffic spikes. The database server is running on a t2.small instance and the web servers are running on t2.micro instances. A replicated backup of the database is running on a t2.small hosted in Tokyo and the system is ready to hot-switch Japan and spin up web servers should some disaster strike the Oregon data centre. Hopefully this doesn't happen.
2017 is going to be quite a year. There are a number of updates currently in the works, as well as a new admin theme that should make the system easier to use on tablets and phones. It's also becoming very clear that people generally do not want to use websites for the social side of 10Centuries. There are a few social applications that are currently in the works by community members, and I'll likely build one that is focussed on Blogging, Note-Taking, ToDos, and Photos starting this coming spring. There's a lot going on under the hood, and the recent speed improvements will go a long way to making sure the system can continue to operate with a minimal amount of dedicated hardware for the next year or so.
As for Photos, this will be going live in the next few weeks and will hopefully be a workable alternative to Flickr, though less geared towards photography buffs. People will have all the standard features, such as albums and whatnot, and we'll also see a little bit of integration with blog posts, allowing people to put slideshows in their posts if they so choose. The ToDo functions will also see some updates in the next little bit, with the ability to set priorities and pins, as well as the ability to have a shared ToDo list with accounts you specify. One other update that will be available to everyone is "HTTPS Everywhere". Thanks to the power and ease of Let's Encrypt, every site on 10C will automatically be given the option to use HTTPS, and it will be on by default for all sites, including those with custom domains.
Next year will be quite busy, and there are a lot of positive updates coming. Hopefully we'll see some more people sign up and use the service, as there's a lot to like about 10Centuries. Have any questions, comments, or concerns? Just get in touch via the contact form or on Social.
12 hours and 1 second if you really want to be specific
Idle for more than 6 months with no activity from the account owner