excuse me? running a (mostly) static site that just makes API calls to third parties is costing you lots of money?
i swear, everyone's obsession with running things on per-instance resources that charge fractions of a cent that add up astronomically. run this on a $5/mo VPS in ovhcloud and save yourself the headache.
If you visit the site today with scripts blocked, the site still works and the page is only 160kB, including 140kB of images of book covers. And the "I checked the server logs and saw the traffic" part of the story happened before they added these ads (see https://notfunatparties.substack.com/p/inside-a-viral-websit... for a better timeline)
Don't get me wrong either, I thought the site was awesome and visited it often during that week. Reading the post-mortem of it was super cool too... until I read how the site was developed. I get the idea of a practicing small sites with a framework of choice. You need to practice, especially in a real world environment. Nothing wrong there. But the site could have been made in strict HTML and CSS, by hand, and called it a day. No one would know the difference. It was a super simple, basic site. There was zero special in it that needed anything more than that. Sure, maybe something was going on the background, but if that ended up not being useful for the dev, it was surely a zero value addon for the user. A lot of these frameworks are the equivalent of hiring a semi-truck with a 53 foot trailer to move a couch across town. Yes, it works. Yes, there are potential benefits if something were to pop-up. But, a small city van or pick-up truck would have gotten the job done easier, cheaper, and faster. 99.9% of the time, that's all you need. If you're moving a couch, the likelihood of you needing the extra space because someone calling you up to move pallets worth of stuff is minimal. Same goes with small, single purpose sites. Basing everything on that 00.1% chance is pretty silly.
War and Peace (the book) in simple text is roughly 900kb from Project Gutenberg if I remember correctly. That's how many hours of reading? 587,000 word count. Average adult reading speed is about 200 words a minute. 2,935 minutes or 48.9 hours of reading. 2 days worth of constant reading. Minus pictures and videos, when you traverse the web, how many pages require more than a mb worth of data for providing 10 minutes worth of reading content? Twitter is probably the ultimate champion in bloat for mb to read time ratio. Design and styling is one thing that people are going to use as some excuse for the bloat. But with all the people that use HN, don't piss in my pocket. Overly graphic designs aren't needed for conveying content well. I hope I don't have to get into how all the background tracking needs to go straight to the same ring of hell that holds people who kick puppies and kittens.
I remember a day when programmers valued themselves in being efficient in delivery. Oh, the good ol'days. Now get off my lawn!
You've also been posting many unsubstantive and/or flamewar comments elsewhere. We ban accounts that do that, so please stop.