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Comment by philipps | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for sharing this. I’ve donated (small amounts of) money to Mozilla and Wikipedia in the past. Your post makes me consider donating to archive.org this year.

Edit: typo

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How does archive.org make money? I imagine their storage costs must be quite high.

They don’t. They are a non-profit 501c3 charity that relies on donations.

I think what the parent meant is "how does archive.org pay their bills?".

I thought I was answering that. Where did I go wrong?

Are you saying they don't pay their bills?

I'm saying they pay their bills (utilities, hardware costs, salaries) with donations, US dollars obtained from those donating.

> How does archive.org make money?

Donations (https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/943...)

> I imagine their storage costs must be quite high.

No, they aren't. Building and hosting your own storage is cheap. Same reason Backblaze and Dropbox built their own storage systems.

> Building and hosting your own storage is cheap

Archive.org uses S3 extensively. Not exactly cheap.

Can you provide a citation? To my knowledge, the Archive does not use Amazon's S3 storage system (which they refer to in places as "S3" [1]), only they're on their own internal storage system [2].

[1] https://archive.org/help/abouts3.txt

[2] https://archive.org/web/petabox.php

To the best of my knowledge, the Archive has it's own machines to store data. It is an Archive and one of the principles was to have the know how to preserve data even if the cloud providers disappear.

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