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Comment by angiolillo

6 hours ago

> It costs him almost nothing to run

> Maintenance cost is effectively zero...

His estimates[1] of ongoing costs seem different:

> I spend probably 60 hours a week continuously improving this website, answering visitors' questions, solving their shoelace problems – even granting permission for my material to be re-used by other educators.

> All of this effort earns me less than 1/5 of the Australian National Minimum Wage.

> I'm thinking of calling this my “Million Dollar Website” – not because it's worth a million dollars but because it has cost me a million dollars compared to what I could have earned at a regular job (based on an average Australian annual wage of $50,000 × 25+ years).

Granted it seems like you're commenting just on the cost of maintaining the site's HTML/CSS, and I agree that making the website simpler reduces those costs. But even with more complex websites the development costs are often less than the cost of developing good content, attracting people to your site, paying for hosting, etc.

[1] https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/support.htm

3 comments

angiolillo

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LeifCarrotson  5 hours ago

Content creating is not maintenance. And hosting of a static site is dirt cheap, caching works flawlessly.

It could've been a two-million-dollar website if he'd tried to roll his own CMS and Javascript framework, for zero benefit over the one-million-dollar website he actually built.

  • angiolillo  2 hours ago

    > Content creating is not maintenance.

    Technical maintenance isn't the only kind of website maintenance. Unless you're ready to put a site into hibernation, maintaining the content is an ongoing cost. For example, Ian adds testimonial photos and quotes that people submit via email not to mention corrections and improvements based on feedback.

    > It could've been a two-million-dollar website if he'd tried to roll his own CMS and Javascript framework

    Sure, and it could have been a three-million-dollar website if he wrote a web server from scratch in a language he invented to host the bespoke CMS and JavaScript framework he created.

    But more reasonable alternatives to a personal HTML/CSS site like this would be either an off-the-shelf CMS or a third-party website builder. Those seem like they'd be more expensive in some ways and cheaper in others.