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Most websites are completely trivial to host. e.g. from what I can find, Reddit only gets ~8k page views/second, and only has 13B posts/comments total? An old archive of the site had ~1.7B posts/comments at ~1TB uncompressed, meaning you could fit every text post today on a few SSDs and host the whole site for the price of a high end gaming computer (or a couple of them for redundancy) and an unmetered connection.

In our modern world of user generated content and incredible hardware, any nerd could host even the most popular sites as a relatively cheap hobby. The only thing making them non-trivial is... all of the infrastructure for the ads, spying, and control. That and image/video hosting, which could be done through something like ipfs if it were integrated into browsers.




Spoken like an engineer with no real understanding of what it takes to host Reddit let alone an understand of the business side of things. You have zero idea what you are talking about.


Like I said in my comment, the "business side of things" (i.e. the infrastructure to support ads, spying, control) are what makes it non-trivial. You can't use "making money is hard" as an argument against me saying that it's so cheap a hobbyist could do it for fun.

Hosting a forum that gets the traffic Reddit does at higher availability than Reddit does (Reddit returns error pages all the time) is absolutely trivial on modern hardware (except for images/videos, as I said). I've known several people that have unmetered connections/servers in datacenters as a hobby.

The entire history of every text post/comment ever on that site could fit on 2-3 SSDs now. The traffic is nothing. It doesn't take a lot to host a site that can fit on one computer with plenty of room to spare.


Lol :)


> the business side of things

Sites relying primarily on user generated content really shouln't have a business side of things. Its just grift.


Another engineer who doesnt understand the cost and complexity of building and maintaining a platform or marketing. Love it :)




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