(It's not writing off a bad debt, which is technically different)
So: your costs are still X but now your revenue is Y instead of Y + (that one user's fee which likely wasn't going to get paid anyway)
You pay taxes on Y - X (profit).
So, really, their costs just increased by whatever it cost to deliver that data (likely zero depending on how they're billed for it), and their revenue didn't change at all.
Turning a no-collect situation into a PR positive.
To be fair: it really depends on their datacenter environment; if they're physically hosting, this is probably a rounding error. But, if instead, they're actually running on top of AWS or another hyperscaler and paying 9 cents per gigabyte for traffic, then their bandwidth bill could actually be quite substantial and they're just passing that along to the customer. In that case, this could be actually quite generous of them.
Doesn't seem to be a good idea to be associated with that.
2) This comes as the CEO of Vercel, Guillermo Rauch, is already facing community backlash for publicly supporting Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, a move that’s led to boycotts and migrations off the platform among developers. All my homies hate Vercel.
and if it doesn't spawn up another $30 instance and add another RR entry to the dns
serving static content scales horizontally perfectly
Part of why this is a problem is that consumer grade NICs often tend to overload quite a lot of work to the CPU that higher end server specced NICs do themselves, as a laptop isn't really expected to have to keep up with 10K concurrent TCP connections.
Considering the content is essentially static, this is actually viable. Search functions might be a bit problematic, but that's a solvable problem.
Of course you pay with engineering skills and resources.
I guess you would need some sort of search term to document id mapping that gets downloaded to the browser but maybe there's something more efficient than trying to figure out what everyone might be searching for in advance?
And how would you do searching for phrases or substrings? I've no idea if that's doable without having a database server-side that has the whole document store to search through.
I’d interpret “thousands of people hitting a single endpoint multiple times a day” as something like 10,000 people making ~5 requests per 24 hours. That’s 0.5 requests per second.
Some cloud products have distorted an entire generation of developers understanding of how services can scale.
And we are talking about static content. You will be bottlenecked by bandwidth before you are ever bottlenecked by your laptop.
I've hosted side projects on Hetzner for years and have never experienced anything like that. Do you have any references of projects to which it happened?
They offer unlimited bandwidth with their dedicated servers under a “fair usage” policy.
The bandwidth costs would be higher than what you pay monthly, so they would simply drop you.
You are probably using very little bandwidth, so it doesn’t matter in your case.
However, I assume Jmail consumes a very large amount of bandwidth.
But not because of being "not a profitable customer". Mind sharing some links here?
They will sell you a 10Gbps uplink however, with (very reasonably priced) metered bandwidth.
$50000 vs €30. (or €42066.30 vs €30 if I normalize the currency) 5x10^4 vs 3x10^1.
I don't understand how those are in the same ballpark? I thought saying something is in the same ballpark suggested that they are similar in scale, and the implication is that little-leauge does not play in the same ballpark as a NBA team. They are in the same category (baseball), but not at all the same level.
50k/mo is 600,000/yr vs 360/yr at 30/mo. Thats existential for a 1MM/yr company. Neither register on a balance sheet for a 1B/yr company. They are both closer to 0 than being a major cost.
Have seen it happen to smaller projects and even pointed it out when Vercel took static sites down.
So they have always had a bad rep in my opinion.
Isn't he going to ask for a "favor"?
Vercel's pricing is so ridiculously convoluted that you can't even cleanly compare usage. With render/railway/(insert provider of choice) you can at least predict that you're your biggest cost is going to be egress.
edit: I just saw that it gets 450m pageviews. I'm guessing on the upper end this costs ~$1k with railway + cloudflare?
Remember kids, they're incentivized to get you to build something to burn as much compute as possible.
https://xcancel.com/rauchg/status/2020984434338693622 or https://nitter.net/rauchg/status/2020984434338693622
This is the first Threads link I've ever seen here. Is that what Threads mainly is, reposting X screenshots and starting a sidechain conversation?
Use nitter or xcancel
That seems extremely expensive. What the heck?
Is he using Vercel Functions as well?
I think this is where some SPA + a few instances of a Node.js server + Redis would be much cheaper.
I'd say you can probably serve this much on $1k/month? It's simple content. It's not like it needs to do complex business logic in the backend.
And with the entire world perusing this archive, I'm sure the costs will be very high, regardless of provider.
Did I get something wrong?
Since the Epstein files dropped they've cloned gmail, gdrive, gmessages, amazon orders, transcribed court proceedings (yes with AI), fights, facebook, and imessages.
It's an insane amount of work. They added the latest batch of files, photos, videos in like 2 weeks. And he's keeping up files that the justice department took down.
jmail has made it so much easier for everyone to explore the files.
I don't know how Riley has planned to monetize this or if it's simply for the public good. I can totally understand not wanting to optimize for cost from the outset. And I see a lot of abject criticism on every social media platform rather than constructive.
But your point stands, the amount of work they've put into this is remarkable.
Setting up a VPS with Node takes ten minutes and is miles cheaper. And it's not like you never have to debug issues with serverless configurations, which can even occasionally be harder to debug because of their proprietary natures.
Guillermo reply: https://x.com/rauchg/status/2020984434338693622
mhitza•2h ago
jmclnx•2h ago
>Vercel's CEO offers to cover expenses of 'Jmail' as it has become the number 1 site for tracking the Epstein files
and the expense is 46,486 USD. He said he is happy to cover expenses and that Vercel worked good for your needs.
plasticsoprano•2h ago
guywithahat•26m ago
Say what you want about Elon but X is where all the investors and tech execs are. Nobody is going to sign up for threads because they saw it link to a picture in a HN post