CodeAbbey Financials

Have you ever wondered what it costs to run infrastructure for site like CodeAbbey?

Perhaps you are considering launching your own site?

Or just curious whether it generates profit or headache? :)

No Secret!

The site's core (web-interface, functionality to load problem statements, generate input data, accept and check answers, update statistics) resides on typical shared web-hosting, working in PHP and MySQL. This hosting become a bit more expensive since we started, currently it is about $14 per month. I won't say which exactly hosting for I'm not ready to recommend it. It's less or more ok, but somewhat vague on prices. I believe one may find slightly cheaper hosting for the similar load and features.

This gives about $168 per year.

Also there is a fee for domain name, about $16 currently (again I believe it could be a bit cheaper with different registrar, like namecheap - hopefully we'll move there some day).

And that's all about main expenses.

There were some small occasional payments - once for testing adwords - few times as recognition for people who made some features for the site. I suppose it was no more than $200 in total.

And what income?

Note! Part about ads is not relevant anymore. We stopped showing them early in 2020. Ad networks nowadays give out more silly content to my opinion and that is annoying so I decided to get rid of them.

CodeAbbey is not targeted for generation of money. However several people made donations (probably amounting to $150 or so). And besides this there is a small inflow from google ads (you may see small annoying banner in the right top corner).

However, we hide banner on mobile pages, don't show it on main page - and in about 50% cases show our "custom" banners instead (those yellow, with links to various programming-related resources). Initially I've added these ads to see whether they somehow affect google search ranking. At some point it looked like they do (though no one can be sure).

So ads generate about $12 in a month or about $140 per year. Current site popularity is pretty constant, so this income isn't going to increase over time. However it is not bad anyway as it almost covers expenses. No plans to add more banners or paid content or features.

We strongly believe that the only way to make education equally accessible is by making it free. :)

P.S. if you want to donate some money - here is the page with details.