I don't plan to provide hourly breakdowns of work done and cost/worker that BlockTrades does because it is too sensitive to publish publicly (BlockTrades does a lot of contract work and contract work represents a substantial portion of our income).
But I can say that the hourly rate we're requesting for this task is much higher than will be typical for our hive-related work, as a large portion of the work was done by our most experienced and expensive personnel.
In an ideal world, we could have waited till someone cheaper was available to do the work, but this work was done under a couple of constraints: 1) we needed the initial setup done extremely quickly because of the Hive HF deadline and 2) we needed someone with direct access to our primary data center.
At this point, some of the work can be passed off to lower-cost personnel (and some is), but I don't plan to drop the main architect of the existing design entirely from the task, not only because he knows the system well, but also because he's extremely talented and has a lot of good ideas for how to improve the system.
It should be noted that we didn't really "want" to do this task. I was actually hoping someone else would take it on as part of the initial hardfork work, but no one else seemed interested, and it was a critical piece that had to be done and done correctly (e.g. to avoid potential loss of images from old posts).
I plan to ultimately get us to a more decentralized solution where multiple Hive enthusiasts are hosting portions of the data in some redundant fashion. But the equipment we purchased will be be used in that system and I don't have any "other" use for it here (we already have plenty of fileservers for our own internal needs). I think it's a better solution to distribute the data among Hive enthusiasts than to centralize the storage on an S3-like solution. Among solutions being considered are https://ceph.io and a privately-run IPFS network.
Thanks for the detailed answer! I think it's important that we debunk any speculation from malicious people trying to justify their reasoning about why the DHF would be abused.
It should be pretty clear that having no image-server is nearly as worse as having one that is not highly reliable. And as you said: nobody else wanted to do the job. Developing & setting it up was probably more expensive than it could have been, but based on the time constraints & the circumstances, we can't expect anything better than what you delivered.
So, again: kudos to you and your team for making sure Hive could deliver on its primary social application and obv. this proposal should be voted for! 👍