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Comment by bapak

3 days ago

Static hosting is essentially free. Add ads and it's a cash machine, not the opposite. Either there's something that they didn't tell us or they're incompetent.

The only thing needed is a staticization of their website, which any CMS they had could very easily be set up to do. Look at the archives of NYT, they're barebone pages that preserve the content without any dynamic areas.

11 comments

bapak

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geerlingguy  3 days ago

It is certainly not free at "hundreds of thousands of requests per minute" scale.

  • hansvm  3 days ago

    It's not free, but it's not expensive.

    Server load at that scale is measured in single-digit dollars per month, and bandwidth _might_ require two pipes with enough images being loaded. Multiply by 20 for replication and latency issues, and you're still only talking $200/month.

    As a ballpark, even bad ad impressions bring in $10/mille, maybe $1/mille for something unintrusive. Does Anandtech get more than 200k impressions per month? If we're talking about a "hundreds of thousands of requests per minute" scale then I would certainly hope so.

    • Scoundreller  3 days ago

      That’s the irony: forum traffic has shit cpm, but that’s what they’re keeping alive (for now).

      Users coming direct from organic search to an article tends to have the best: they’re more likely to be buyers and/or find the ads interesting.

      Main downside with ads on tech sites is their users block ads a lot.

    • ivape  3 days ago

      Why would anyone take down a site like this? The content is done, the site is page ranked to the top, it’s passive money.

      1 reply →

  • bravesoul2  3 days ago

    Embarrassingly parallelisable around the globe and embarrassingly easy technically to point DNS to a CDN.

    Even if you have a server doing something 100k rpm isn't insane amount of traffic to handle. It requires a relatively modest server.

  • doctaj  3 days ago

    Wouldn’t Cloudflare’s free CDN handle that? That kind of traffic is dirt cheap.

  • kachapopopow  3 days ago

    It's most definitely free - cloudflare won't even ask you for the business plan (as long as their CDN's are caching properly). I had a site serving 90tb/month on a free plan (99.87% of the traffic was cached).