Operating Costs

I understand that a fair number of Vocal creators are having trouble. I also see a correlation: these creators have approximately 3000+ published stories. That’s a lot, even if they’re just text files, but when you add media, that file size grows exponentially. Anyone else ever get the “Your iCloud storage is full” message on your phone? Time to delete files or buy more storage.

Somehow, there’s a misconception about space on platforms. They don’t exist in some magical free space. They have operational costs separate from employee salaries, and servers and cloud storage are a big part of that. The more data that’s stored, the more expensive the storage is.

Three thousand media-heavy files could use between 500GB and over 2.4 TB of space. That’s a lot. 2TB of space costs an average of $40/month. That cost is before accounting for the costs of bandwidth, redundancy, backups, CDN, encoding, and platform overhead. Using that much storage on a platform that also generates income for the creators is more than a bit unrealistic.

Here I come with an unpopular opinion: everyone needs to take out the trash once in a while. I’ve only been here since July, and I’m already deleting files (taking out the trash). I see an insistence that Vocal magically run this platform at the size it’s grown to the same way they ran it when it was just a few thousand creators, and that can’t be done. There’s a difference between making dinner for your family and catering a wedding with three hundred guests, and there’s a difference in the operational and storage requirements for each. That metric applies elsewhere, even here. Yes, I understand that you aren’t required to be mindful of your data usage; however, it helps to be conscious of it and understand that the size of your account may be contributing to the problems, and this is something you have control of.

So let’s look at the reality about the problems, which seem to stem from accounts with 3000+ published stories that overload the server or one of those other techy things I don’t understand. I don’t understand technology, but I understand systems, and I understand being overwhelmed. Try storing some of your older work elsewhere (challenge entries thst didn’t win, place, or show, for example), and notice the size of your files. The realistic solution, from what I understand, is to delete some media-heavy files and free up some space. Expecting 2TB ≈ $40/month raw storage, plus bandwidth, CDN, redundancy, and revenue sharing for 9.99/ month is unrealistic from a purely economic perspective. Take a minute to appreciate what you have.