This page provides a high level overview of the specifications, stats and costs with running Anime Tosho, for the curious minded. Details are accurate at time of writing in November 2022.

Servers and Setup

Anime Tosho runs on three servers: a processing/updates server, primary webserver and secondary webserver.

Updates Server

This server performs all the behind-the-scenes processing and content generation, including torrent downloads, uploads/mirroring content, screenshot extraction etc.

Stats

• Average bandwidth usage in Oct 2022: 235GB in + 1,558GB out per day
• Average torrent seed (upload/download) ratio: ~1.3 (target ratio: 1.25)
• Database size (on disk): 12.1GB (6.4GB shared + 5.7GB private)

Setup/Specs

• Host: Online.net
• Type: dedicated/"bare metal" server
• CPU: Xeon L3426 (4 cores / 8 threads) [GB5]
• RAM: 16GB
• Disk: 2x 2TB HDD (in mixed RAID modes across partitions)
• Bandwidth: 300Mbps unmetered
• OS: Debian amd64
• Cost: €187/year

Many standard off-the-shelf tools are used during processing, however these are coordinated with completely custom scripts. Examples include:

• Torrenting: Transmission
• Scraping: custom script; CloudScraper used when necessary
• Uploading to DDL hosts: custom script
• Uploading to Usenet: ParPar, Nyuu
• Series/episode tagging: custom script; AniDB used as source
• Media file information: mediainfo, ffprobe, mkvmerge-identify
• Screenshot handling: ffmpeg, VapourSynth
• Subtitle extraction: mkvextract
• Compression/archiving: 7zip, xz, cwebp
• ...and a bunch of other tools I forgot to mention

Primary Webserver

This server serves the main website (animetosho.org). Updates are received from the updates server via database replication.

Stats

• Average bandwidth usage in Oct 2022: 0.86GB in + 9.25GB out per day
• Typical page requests: ~400k/day
• Website database size (on disk): 178MB private + 5.9GB shared (updates)

Setup/Specs

• Host: BuyVM
• Type: KVM virtual server
• CPU: 1 vCore (Ryzen 3900X)
• RAM: 1GB
• Disk: 20GB SSD
• Bandwidth: 1Gbps shared
• OS: Debian amd64
• Cost: US$42/year

This server runs a nginx, MariaDB, PHP and Sphinxsearch setup to handle the website.

Secondary Webserver

This server serves everything the primary webserver doesn't, such as screenshots, RSS feeds and the mirror site. Updates are received from the updates server via database replication and lsync file synchronisation.

Stats

• Average bandwidth usage in Oct 2022: 9.04GB in + 121.89GB out per day
• Typical requests: ~1,970k/day (feed.animetosho.org) + ~21k/day (mirror.animetosho.org) + ~204k/day (storage.animetosho.org)
• Storage files size: 537GB (408GB screenshots + 102GB attachments + 15GB NZBs + 12GB torrents)

Setup/Specs

• Host: Online.net
• Type: dedicated/"bare metal" server
• CPU: Core i3 530 (2 cores / 4 threads) [GB5]
• RAM: 4GB
• Disk: 2x 1TB HDD (mixed RAID modes)
• Bandwidth: 1Gbps
• OS: Debian amd64
• Cost: €117/year

As this server hosts a copy of the main website, it runs a similar setup, but also has some additional scripts for serving screenshots and attachments.

Costs

Server costs are listed above, which make up the bulk of the costs of running Anime Tosho. Currently, the only other recurring cost is the domain name registration (roughly US$13/year), which also includes DNS hosting, and Usenet accounts for uploading (cost varies/unpredictable). There have been more costs in the past, such as 1Fichier premium accounts and a server to specifically handle that.

All up, costs total around $386/year or $32.17/month at time of writing, ignoring fees and forex expenses.

Note that Anime Tosho has no revenue stream, so all costs are paid out-of-pocket by the site admin.