we are at an average of about 400 visits per month over the last 4 months and there are currently 10 members signed up.
Monthly upkeep costs run $60/month for Cloudflare and the DigitalOcean server.
Why are you paying for so much? I have websites that get 4000 visits
per day that run fine on the free Cloudflare plan and a $5 DO droplet.
I can tell you that there is over $10,000 invested
Invested in what?
Domain = reg fee
Software = free eCommerce script (if you paid to have this custom made, IDK what to say to you)
Accepting Bitcoin = free plugin from Bitpay/other payment processor (also why take the time and risk to run your own bitcoind instance?)
Social media accounts = free
Even if you have no idea how to set any of this up, you could easily hire a dev to get it up and running from scratch for just a few hundred dollars. I have no idea how you managed to spend $10,000 on such a simple website.
For one, the original script is not free. It is paid and licensed. But, that few hundred dollars is a drop in the bucket compared to the extensive customization that has been done.
The real investment is that the script has been completely customized with tons of code to create all of the functionality of the site's bitcoin and escrow capabilities, working EXACTLY as we want it to. This is many months of high dollar dev work.
In case you missed the point, there is no "free script" in the world that does what this site does and no other site shares our code.
Regarding the VPS hosting and non-free cloudflare, there are two things to consider. First, because we are running our own bitcoind service, the VPS we use has to have enough storage space to store the blockchain and then some to spare for growth. Therefore, we are on a higher level VPS. Secondly, we are CHOOSING to use the paid-for Cloudflare services for their DDOS protection.
Everything can be done multiple ways. This was a high dollar project and has been treated as such.