[ Mean Hosting Fee ]
SSP Hosting
Apps which make use of server-side Parthonyte code (SSPs) are hosted by Parthorama, hosting fees are between $5 and $50 per month. They run on the SPYRE, which stands for Server-side ParthonYte Runtime Environment. The SPYRE only supports scalar data types, not lists and dictionaries. It also has access to the scratchpad, which is similar to a spreadsheet. Every SSP user has their own scratchpad instance.
Scratchpad
The scratchpad has up to 256 columns, and each column has up to 256 rows. Each column has a name of data type string, plus a data type. Allowable data types are integer, long, double, string, string with header, and dictionary. The header is the first 16-bit character of the string which is treated as an integer index of a string list. Each string in the string list is a variable name. Each element of the dictionary has a key and a value, both of type string. No dictionary can have more than 256 elements.
SSP Billing
The monthly hosting fees for each SSP author are calculated from 4 values: average daily storage volume (disk space) in megabytes, bandwidth (amount of data downloaded and uploaded), average daily scratchpad memory usage in bytes, and number of new node allocations (each node takes up 10 bytes of RAM). Each of the 4 values is converted into a percentile, where 0 is the lowest value of all SSPs and 100 is the highest value of all SSPs, for the current month. The 4 percentile values have the following weights: bandwidth = 5, new node count = 2, scratchpad usage = 2, disk space = 1.
The weighted average of those 4 percentile values is calculated and ranked, for each SSP. The ranked SSPs are split into 10 deciles (brackets). All SSPs in the bottom bracket pay $5/month, and all SSPs in the top bracket pay $50/month. No SSP can jump more than 2 brackets from one month to the next.
The population size of each bracket is determined as follows. Let r = 10^(1/9) = 1.2915. Let x = sum, for i goes from 0 to 9, of 10^(i/9). Let N = no. of SSPs. Let w[i] = 10^((9-i)/9) = 10,..., r, 1. Sum of all w[i] values = x. Let p[i] = population size of i-th bracket = (w[i]/x)(N). So the bottommost bracket has the most SSPs, the topmost bracket has the least, and the ratio of the sizes of the bottommost bracket to the topmost bracket is 10. If you do the math, the average hosting fee equals $12.23/month.
Revenue
Assume 8000 regular subscribers exist, and 4000 subscribers with quantity discount exist. Then subscriber revenue = 8000(10) + 4000(5) = $100,000. Assume average SSP hosting fee is $12.25/month, and 800 SSPs exist. Then SSP revenue = 800(12.25)(12) = $117,600. Total annual revenue = 100,000 + 117,600 = $217,600.