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Comment by the_duke | Hacker News Reader

I don't know where they came up with the 73 million sites umber, but let's assume there are that many sites using font awesome.

Most sites are obscure, and rarely get any visitors at all. Maybe 10 a month, or none.

Popular sites that receive a lot of traffic are also visited very frequently by the same user, so the font will be in the cache.

In addition, plenty of sites use a CDN for fontawesome.

I guess that number is off by several orders of magnitude.

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73 million sites comes from our friends at Meanpath (their search engine isn't running anymore, sadly). They showed us on 7.3% of websites. Best guess is there are about a billion sites on the internet. Thus, 73 million.

Where did the 1000/visitors/site/day come from? This is what seems unlikely and improbable. This resource is being cached as well, so these numbers do seem obtuse.

Not sure on the 1000/visitors/site/day. But we're also on some pretty big sites as well. IIRC, the final number there is higher than what MaxCDN (BootstrapCDN folks) serves. Not by much though. Within an order of magnitude I think (which is pretty accurate for this kind of guesswork).

Of those 73 million, how many of them are serving the file themselves, vs pointing to it hosted by someone else? I know you can just point to google directly for their fonts, or unpkg.com for js packages. Is that something people also do for font awesome? Those shared links would greatly increase the cache level, and reduce the number of cache misses, and amount of data served.

According to Netcraft [0] there are currently 171,432,273 active websites. However there were 1,436,724,046 host names on the net. A total of 6,225,374 web-facing computers was reported.

Interestingly the number of active sites hasn't materially changed in 5 years, but host names have skyrocketed.

[0] https://news.netcraft.com/archives/category/web-server-surve...

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