Ongoing costs

The Museum Platform > Pricing > Ongoing costs

Ongoing costs for use of The Museum Platform comprise three main components – hosting, support, and updates – which we have marshalled into a set of plans plus some optional extras, which should suit all needs. Below you can read an overview of these, together with a few requirements and limitations that we like to lay out clearly so that everyone knows what is and isn’t included in the service.

Hosting

The cost of running the site or service on our servers and making it available to end users (or other sites, if we are running an API). Where there are caps (e.g. on bandwidth or collection records and media) there are options to add capacity with most plans. The fees cover:

  • storage and delivery of your collections metadata and images (when using TMP’s CIIM)
  • use of TMP’s core software (licensing fee)
  • essential third-party plugins
  • image hosting, including zooms
  • updates to the server and software stack
  • management of the subdomain in Cloudflare
  • bandwidth, with a high cap.

Read about individual plans and options:

Support

This covers work not included in hosting, but generally not development work beyond tiny tweaks and fixes. An allowance of retained time is included in most plans, with additional time available on a retained or pay-as-you-go basis.

Data and media updates

After initial site build, many sites will want to update the collections data and media periodically. Unless you have your own CIIM integrated into your collections management system this has a cost because it involves time and effort from TMP.

Requirements and limitations

Retained time

With the exception of API-only (“Remote”) products, hosting always includes a base-line 30 minutes per month of retained time in the fee. Of course, additional retained time can be added to your contract if you wish. Retained time does not transfer between months or accumulate, but if you expect to need support of this sort on a regular basis it is a really good way to pay for it, because it is a fraction of the hourly cost of ad hoc time. We can reduce the rate so much because it helps us with planning our capacity, and also because we know you may not use it all, all of the time (but feel free to do so!).

Bandwidth cap

Realistically there is no need to worry about hitting a limit on bandwidth. We measure it only for the website itself, not for collection media, and there is a 200Gb limit (which is a lot of page views). Beyond this the cost for additional capacity is only pennies per Gb, but this just gives us a little protection against the unlikely event of your site dramatically exceeding the allowance (however it is likely that the performance of the server as a whole would suffer if your traffic was extremely high).

The cap above applies to lower end hosting packages. If you have your own server (Advanced package) you may have up to 4Tb allowance for the server as a whole. For bespoke hosting we will work out any cap with you.

Cloudflare

We ask all clients to manage the domain that their site will use through Cloudflare, and to give us appropriate administrative access.

Why? We make extensive use of Cloudflare’s powerful firewalls and other lines of defence for securing websites, as well as for caching content for performance enhancements, so it is essential for it to be in place for any site we host. Without comprehensive defences a site is exposed to DDoS attacks, unruly AI crawlers and many other menaces, and any site comes under attack risks all other sites that share the same server. We consequently make no exceptions to this requirement unless:

  1. you have an advanced or bespoke hosting package with a server that is not shared by other clients; and
  2. we agree other forms of mitigation or an SLA that reflects the consequent risks.

See the “Cloudflare-in-Cloudways” option for an alternative route to using Cloudflare if  necessary.

Complex data and data preparation

If you are not using MDS to provide your data, or your own CIIM, then your data will be imported as a spreadsheet. The ongoing fees for importing new datasets assume that you will provide them in the spreadsheet form that we require, for which we can provide a specification. If you would rather we process some other form of export into the spreadsheet then we will work with you to ensure this process is as smooth as possible. We have a standard pipeline for MODES XML, which assumes that relevant data is present in particular fields (modelled on MODES own example dataset), and the prices below include one for MODES XML using this process.

If you need something different, that’s fine: we are happy to convert your data into the right format on your behalf. However, depending on the state of your data and effort required to prepare it there may be a fee either to build a processing pipeline for you, and/or to run the process for each import. This will be agreed at the beginning and included in your SLA.

Records and image files

All plans include as standard the storage of up to 20,000 object records and 20,000 original image files in the TMP CIIM, if you are using this. If you need more, no problem, the fees are low and laid out here.

The image files will be available as regular files in various sizes and also through a IIIF service that enables zoom viewers and the use of your images in other IIIF-capable viewers such as Mirador or Universal Viewer.