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Comment by snypher | Hacker News Reader

>more than 10 million unique monthly visitors

>our ~$1500/month budget

I understand not wanting to show ads, but is there no way for the users to contribute to hosting costs?

From a quick glance it seems to host obviously copyrighted content for free. In some jurisdictions (like Spain) the companies would have a hard time at court against the website creators, since it's a not-for-profit* website sharing culture.

Now show an ad, or premium accounts, and it becomes a for-profit endeavour which is straight jail time. I'm unsure about donations.

(Based on previous rulings I followed ~10 years ago, laws might have changed IANAL yada yada)

*not for profit != non-profit

They might have a play at being affiliates for sellers of the original material. I suppose a link is an ad, but its also somehow a less dubious way to monetize in my mind.

There is the MangaDex@Home, where users can serve part of disk space/bandwidth to help serve (mainly old) manga chapters. It does need to be something that is running 24/7 (e.g.: not a PC that is shutdown frequently), so something like a VPS or a service is recommended.

Virtually every chapter is served via MD@H now. Client doesn't really need much availability, as long as it can do a graceful shutdown. Even in the event of a sudden shutdown, the trust penalties are much lower than H@H and in practice go away after a trickle of traffic to raise your score

Nice, didn't know about this (there isn't much information about MD@H after the rewrite).

BTW, how can I register my VPS on MD@H? Before we had a dedicated form on the page to register interest, at least after the rewrite I didn't find it. Is it only using something like Discord?

We had a dedicated page for signing up on the v3 version of the site. Currently, yes, it's via our Discord server's MD@H channels.

They had a bit under $80k in crypto in their list of BTC and ETH addresses "leaked" along with the source code when the site was hacked earlier this year.

A $5/mo premium plan would break even so quickly

Premium plan on content that can be considered as dubious in copyright context? Seems like a quick way to get shut down.

premium plan on a virtual badge, NFT or whatever crap you want. content would still be freely available for everybody but the infra costs would be a bit less.

Or even a patreon style 'you get nothing but a supporter badge' with that kind of traffic levels.

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