Last year for April Fools we wrote about the comparative costs of hiring graduate students, postdocs, and lab techs. A pay structure that has always deeply annoyed me.
To keep up with the mildly irrelevant LabOnTheCheap April Fools posts, this post is about some numbers near and dear to our hearts: the cheapness of running Lab On The Cheap.
Lab On The Cheap is hosted on servers from NearlyFreeSpeech.net. A web service that we love, but under no circumstances recommend. NearlyFreeSpeech charges us 5 cents a day for the website, and another 2 cents a day for the SQL server that we use to support WordPress, the open source content management system that runs this website. WordPress we do not love or even like, but we do recommend it, odd how that works.
On top of that we get charged for computing resources, the more people who visit our site the more we get charged. This is currently 50 cents a month, bringing us to ~$3 a month. Add on a Domain Name System (DNS) charge, to route people to the website when they type in www.LabOnTheCheap.com , which by the way costs us $10.34 every year to keep registered as our domain name.
All this brings the expenditures of this project to $5.42 per month. Or a little less then the cost of lunch at Yoshinoya at the Nano Cafe in UCSB .
