In January, we shared our plans to cut PubPub’s infrastructure costs and put the platform on a path to long-term sustainability. That transition is now complete.

At the end of February, we moved PubPub to new, more affordable infrastructure. From what we’ve measured so far, the new setup is not only cheaper but also faster and more stable.

What changed

A few highlights:

• The move to new server infrastructure and the deprecation of rarely-used expensive features (as outlined in our January post) went through without disruption.
• PubPub is now fully containerized and runs as a Docker swarm stack on cloud/hardware-agnostic servers. Anywhere that can run Docker works.
• We’ve added a suite of spam handling tools that reduce unnecessary load on our servers and should cut down on spam activity across the platform.
• Community Impact tabs (the analytics dashboards for each community) have been moved off of external infrastructure and into the main PubPub codebase, which has noticeably improved performance.
• Search, PDF generation, and other services that were previously spread across multiple external tools are now consolidated into the main application. This gives us the ability to offer some better features too, like author-filtering in search queries.

The numbers

We’re still waiting for final bills to settle, but our current analysis puts the new infrastructure at less than 1% the cost of our previous setup. Put another way: every single month of old server costs buys us over 100 months of service in our new configuration. Over 8 years. A more technical breakdown of these savings is in a companion post for anyone interested in the technical details.

The PubPub Sustainability Fund

This connects directly to the PubPub Sustainability Fund we announced in January. While we’ve stabilized server costs, staffing is still the primary ongoing cost. We want to be around to keep servers well maintained and updated, to be responsive to bugs and customization requests, and to keep improving the platform where it counts.

Donations to the Sustainability Fund now go even further. You can be confident that your contributions are covering the costs of a very efficient server stack and the people actively maintaining it. Your donations go a long way.

We want to give an enormous thank you to the individual donors and organizations that have been early supporters of the Sustainability Fund. Supporting organizations include:

• Gates Foundation
• MIT Libraries
• Wake Forest University, Z. Smith Reynolds Library
• Appalachian State University, Belk Library & Information Commons
• University of Massachusetts, Amherst, W.E.B. Du Bois Library
• mediastudies.press

Your early support means the world to us and to the thousands of communities that rely on PubPub.

Looking ahead

This transition isn’t a final chapter for PubPub. It’s the opposite. With a stable, affordable base underneath us, we’re in a much better position to keep improving the platform and exploring what comes next. The work we did to get here opened doors that weren’t open before, and we’re excited about what we can build together going forward.