Cat's Arch

Supporting Me

Tor | I2P

I don't want your money!

Please, if you clicked on this with the intention of donating then read this.

I don't want your money! This is one of my hobbies. I gladly pay for everything because I find it fun, it's taught me a ton, and it continues to introduce me to new things! I can easily pay for these things and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. However, I absolutely thank you for even considering sending money my way.

If you really want to support me then check out the contact info in the footer and send me a nice email or something! A little positive interaction goes a long way to keep me motivated and show me that more than just bots are seeing and using something I've put so much time into.

I also don't want to take money so that I don't feel I owe it to anyone to keep hosting specific services or always be doing constant work on any of this. So to keep it stress free I won't accept direct donations.

However, I absolutely wouldn't complain about a reduced bill so I do provide a few affiliate/referral links (that don't cost you anything extra) for some services I use, alongside my honest opinion about that service in the affiliate/referral links section.

^ Back to top ^

My costs

Last updated 1/2/26

Here's a quick breakdown of my costs. Pay attention to the frequency of each one because they aren't all the same.

Service Cost
Domain $11.08 USD / year
US Server ~$6.74 USD / month
DE Server ~$6.74 USD / month
updown.io monitoring ~$29.31 USD / ~13 months

That comes out to roughly $16.66 USD a month or $199.90 USD a year. The servers and updown.io are originally priced in euros and so my price can slightly vary based on the conversion rate.

updown.io can also vary even more depending on how many monitors I have active and how frequent they check. So sometimes I can wait longer to buy more credits, or need to buy them sooner.

This might sound like a lot when you look at the yearly number, but I could work for only one day each month and be able to cover it with plenty extra! The domain is also already paid for up until July 25th, 2028.

My only other cost so far was $30.55 for 50 aged Twitter accounts to run Nitter. I've also considered buying some form of VPN but the ProtonVPN free tier has had me covered so far.

The domain is bought through Porkbun and both of the servers are Netcup VPS 1000 G12's that I have a slight permanent discount on due to a Black Friday deal.

^ Back to top ^

Below is my honest opinion about some of the services I use and a link to them that will get me some form of discount if you sign up and purchase something.

If you find anything else I should mention about these that I hadn't caught then please let me know! I don't wanna promote garbage.

Netcup

Netcup is my VPS provider. I chose them for how they handle bandwidth versus other providers. I have a 2.5GB connection that gets throttled to 200Mbps if I use more than 2TB in a 24 hour period. This is handled separately between upload and download, so I can do 200Mbps up and 200Mbps down at the same time for 400Mbps total while being throttled.

Root Servers are the same except it's 3TB in a 24 hour period and a 300Mbps throttle instead (still seperate for up and down).

Compared to several other providers I looked at that have hard bandwidth caps or a "pay as you go" system, this was perfect since I regularly use a ton of data a month. For example, at the time of writing this I had used about 24TB on the US server in a 5 day period. Compared to something like Hetzner that has a 20TB (only 1TB in the US) monthly cap where you pay for any over the cap, this works amazingly.

So far I have no major complaints about Netcup. They verified my info for the first server pretty quick, and when I bought the DE server later on it was ready in just a few minutes. They even give permanent discounts on machines with free upgrades for Black Friday! Personally I had never seen this before and thought it was pretty cool.

However, you do only get one free exportable backup (meaning you can download it or restore it to a different product) per server and have to pay for any subsequent ones. The worst deal for this is 1 export for 1.50 euros, and you can order them in larger amounts for a very slight discount. It isn't expensive but I'm not fond of it nonetheless.

Also sometimes the cheapest location for a VPS or Root Server changes, and if you buy a server in one of the higher priced locations than your monthly price will ALWAYS be at that higher monthly price. So the best bet is waiting for their cheapest location to change, which does at least seem to happen fairly frequently. You can always repurchase the server if you realize it's cheaper in the future, and then cancel the existing one.

For Netcup I can give out vouchers that get you a discount, and I'll get 10% of whatever you pay Netcup off of my bill as long as you keep paying them. Unfortunately this only works if you're a new customer. The vouchers are below:

You can redeem these at checkout.

If you try to use one and it doesn't work then use my contact info in the footer to reach out and I'll generate another to give to you!

I can also create vouchers for domains and webhosting, but as I haven't used either from Netcup I wasn't comfortable advertising them here. If you really want one feel free to ask, but I can't give any input on how it'll be.

updown.io

updown.io is what I use for external uptime monitoring of everything I host.

I really like their apdex feature since it can email me to let me know when things are performing poorly, which has actually been really useful!

However it's not unheard of for one of their servers to randomly start spiking in response times while the others stay normal, which can lead to false positives for the apdex score. It isn't a frequent problem though.

It does do really well for telling me when things are down, and can also be used to have internal servers poll them so you can get an alert when the server goes down without having to expose any of it's services.

The cost isn't bad either, you only consume credits if you're checking something and how fast you use those credits depends on how many checks you're doing and how often they're checking (1 minute, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, etc). So I can slow down how often the servers get checked and save money, or disable some checks outright.

Here's my updown.io referral link. This link will give you an 100k extra credits on signup, and me 100k credits on your first purchase.

^ Back to top ^