what drives hosting costs

[Greg Stanton Marra]

It's looking like we're going to be able to find a sponsor for TBA in 2020, so I'm not currently concerned about our hosting costs.

However, several people have asked "what drives our hosting costs?". I've put two examples Google Cloud Platform bills in a spreadsheet in our thebluealliance-developers google drive "planning" folder. March 2019 is indicative of a "peak season" month, and Dec 2019 is indicative of a "offseason" month.

We recently paused a SQL instance that was part of the GameDay Computer Vision system and costing a bunch to run idle, so I expect our "offseason" costs will go down. Generally, I don't think we're at a point where we need to invest a lot in hosting efficiency right now, and our efforts are better spent in "making the site easier to maintain" vs "cheaper to run".

Welcome to 2020!

-Greg