Interesting project. I'm curious about his mention of server costs in the sponsor request - it looks like he's serving downloads of the icon pack from github, so that shouldn't be a big bandwidth cost. It appears that he's using vercel serverless; the free tier appears quite generous, and the $20 paid tier should be affordable. I understand asking for donations, more just curious why it is expensive to run this.
Edit: never mind; seems he's using firebase storage, which could get pricey. Maybe it would make sense to serve over github pages or similar to keep costs down. Or even an el cheapo VPS, which should have more than enough space to store the images and plenty of bandwidth to serve them. Cache the number of icons and run a cronjob every ten minutes that scans the directory and updates the number.
I'm not sure if I'm reading this project correctly but aren't all of the icons already hosted on github for free? This whole website can be hosted for free on github pages with one javascript script for search, right?
No, he's pulling the individual ones from firebase storage. That's also why the webpage displays "0 icons" for a second after it loads; it has to go fetch the icon total from firebase.
The issue is not actually hosting, all the icons are lazy loaded. I'm pulling the data about the icons from Firestore which include a URL for the png and the .icns file. Right now I'm looking at alternatives, I'm aware this is not the most efficient thing, but I just haven't had time to change it since it blew up last Friday. For reference, last week we had a little less than 1000 icons, and today there's almost 2000.
yeah but the icons are already on github aren't they? Why are they on reduntly hosted on firebase? This whole website can be free on github pages - very confusing.
Because I stopped using GitHub to submit icons to let non techies submit them, GitHub is all good for static sites but I needed something that would let uses submit icons directly from the website without needing to know how to use GitHub, here is a thread I created that explains it all better: https://twitter.com/elrumo/status/1328860367850758146?s=21
I’ll be moving away from Firebase into something that more sense soon anyway, it was just an oversight from me as I not expected it to to get to 40k visits in just a few days, I was only expecting a few hundred a day.
It uses Firebase.
It really looks very expensive for the functionality and 1.5K monthly visits.. But the developer seems to be fully transparent about costs.
When I built this site I really didn't think much of it and used Firebase just because it was really quick to build and I was getting only a few hundred visits a day. But since last Friday it has received over 35K visits hence the really expensive bill, which by the way is not so much for the storage, but for reading the Firestore database. I simply haven't had the time to re-build the site in a more efficient way it since then, hopefully tomorrow I'll get working on it and find a better alternative solution.
Based on information from the developer's website, it looks like they're still a university student, so probably using what is a cool and easy approach; they probably haven't learned a lot about load and scale. That Firebase bill could probably be written off as tuition :-)
I only used Firebase because when I built the site it was only a small scale solution, but now that is has blown I'm looking at alternatives because this is just a waste of everyone's money. And by the way, I only graduated from my master's last month, and I'm not even a computer scientist, I went to design school and have a degree in industrial design, hence my messy code practices. I'm working on them though, so if anyone is willing to give me a hand or some guidance, feel free to do so.
Most probably you're right, it's sad, costs could probably be a lot smaller and contributions could be a small but sweet and deserved compensation for coffee/beer :-)
Edit: never mind; seems he's using firebase storage, which could get pricey. Maybe it would make sense to serve over github pages or similar to keep costs down. Or even an el cheapo VPS, which should have more than enough space to store the images and plenty of bandwidth to serve them. Cache the number of icons and run a cronjob every ten minutes that scans the directory and updates the number.