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Comment by elcomet | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how much it costs them to maintain this service.

I run https://dummyimage.com, the first placeholder image service which has been online since 2007. I use a 1GB, 1vCPU instance from DreamCompute costing $6.00 per month. That's it.

To be fair dummyimage.com doesn't do any sort of image reading or resizing. Source doe at https://github.com/kingkool68/dummyimage

What kind of traffic does your service attract?

If I had to guess by his infrastructure, none.

For reference: I do about 7GB of image traffic/day for placekitten (a similar service) for about the same cost ($6/mo). I do resize images.

I love placekitten. Thank you for this service!

The article mentions Digital Ocean provides the infrastructure so it seems the only cost is dev time. It reads almost like a promotional for DO with all of their services mentioned, which is probably why they support it to begin with.

I though about that, too, but that's not any different from using AWS specific services. I actually now realized why they use bloody annoying different names: it's free marketing when someone writes about how they implemented stuff instead of having a generic name.

Different names are alto useful for negatives. Someone writing about an issue with their CDN is far less useful than saying the issue occurs with Akamai.

In general I like to see brand signals: if someone I respect mentions that they use Cloudflare, that is useful information, even without further details.

Unsolicited mentions are usually useful, it's just sneaky paid advertising is bad.

>it's just sneaky paid advertising is bad.

Not possible to detect under these circumstances, then.

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