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Comment by 734129837261 | Hacker News Reader

Let us say that you work for or own a website with 1m unique visitors per month. Let us assume your average JS library size that can be cached and outsourced totals 400 kilobytes (that's on the low end).

1 million * 400 kilobytes = 400 gigabytes

For AWS the entry level tier per gigabyte is $0.15/GB.

That is a whopping $60 USD per MONTH that you can save by running your scripts on a CDN.

So, yeah.

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I don't think it is done to save money. I reckon it's done because the MVP tutorial they used when they got started used the CDN. Or they are using Wordpress and the theme decided to use it (... I just checked mine as I recently changed the theme, luckily it doesn't do this). It might also be done because people don't care. If it ain't broke don't fix it.

And someone is paying that...

The users are paying for it with their privacy.

CDN providers are not charities: they sell traffic metadata.

that's what I meant, million data points costs $60

Why are you serving 400kb of JavaScript? Why are you paying $0.15/GB?

These numbers are certainly not on the low end.

I assume that it's "for the sake of argument"

https://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/for-the-sake-of-argum...

Also it's a bit like a proof. By assuming worse numbers, and arriving at $60, your better numbers will only prove the point even more.

By arriving worse numbers, you arrive at a higher price, so it makes your point weaker if anything. If a site bundles half a meg of JS, it's going to be unpleasant to use, and if you're serving so much JS it's hurting you financially, it's probably time to reconsider what you're doing.

No it makes the point stronger, the point being "it's cheap enough to host your own CDN that you don't need to use a free one". And further "it is so so cheap that you can still make these dumb mistakes and it's still worth hosting the files yourself!"

It's like saying should I use a dry cleaner? Well it's only $50 to get them to iron my shirts, so it's worth it for my time saved. Then someone says "$50! You are being ripped off, if your "doing it right", you'd get it done for $10", to which I say, well if it's worth me paying $50, then it is worth me paying $10, so my original argument "use a dry cleaner" is made stronger.

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