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Yeah it was statically hosted in the end (initially it wasn't quite static). When it was at its most popular, the total site size including JavaScript was around 70kb as far as I can remember, so it didn't come anywhere near as high as 70TB.

If you have hobby site, then failing action "going dark" is better than "going cost 1000 times more".

That is true, mostly i think that the initial commenter underestimated the costs, but it seems that i myself have overestimated them.

> Assuming we are talking about 1MB per visit then that is roughly 70TB.

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)