We reached out to our Systems committee for more information for you, and they said:
The cost of the servers is not so much about the storage size – in fact, the database is currently only about 3.6TB – but the amount of computing power that we need to serve the level of traffic that AO3 receives. With almost 3 billion pageviews per month currently, we need some pretty beefy servers to power everything.
We are purchasing 5 servers for Elasticsearch and 5 new database servers. We currently have 3 database servers, but we decided to increase that to 5 this time for added redundancy and future-proofing against potential issues. Each of the database servers has two 64-core processors, and 3TB of RAM. The Elasticsearch servers are all 160 cores and 768GB of RAM. All of these are from AMD's latest generation of EPYC processors, so some cost is expected, but we buy machines from Supermicro which is more cost effective.
If you want to learn more, here's a presentation one of our Systems volunteers gave recently that includes some interesting statistics and other technical information about how AO3 works and how much it costs to run a site like AO3.
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OTW_News_Post_Moderation (Official) Thu 17 Apr 2025 10:24PM UTC
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