this will be a long answer and people on bsky will have to click through.

my domains are with dreamhost and namecheap. they run about $15/year on average each, and we have a handful (like, 5 or 6, i don't keep track very well). three of these are directly tcrf related (badnik.zone for IRC, rustedlogic for the network, tcrf for itself). these generally creep up slowly over the years since we use standard .net and domains instead of funny .gay or .horse or whatever.

our hosting setup is very lean. the majority of things that aren't tcrf are dreamhost shared hosting, which i used to love but in the last 11 years has gotten worse and worse and in the last few they've really embraced ai and lowered the quality of everything else. that plan runs like $300 every two years.

tcrf includes the irc server (which is a $5 or $10 digitalocean droplet), a small second server ($5/mo or whatever) for processing some backend things, and then the main server itself, which is the 8gb linode tier. we add in the backup service, and then we also have an expandable storage drive for all the multimedia files. linode is about $160/month right now, and with their acquisiton by akamai years ago it too is getting more expensive (and worse). it's still better than other options.

all told, our hosting setup currently costs me about $220 in a typical month, with spikes every so often as longer-term expenses hit (like the DH 2-year plan or 1-yr domain renewals). half a year ago it was $180. a year ago it was $160. it rules.