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Comment by hs | Hacker News Reader

how much does it cost digg in bandwith dollar?

OK, I'll bite.

The message itself is 106 bytes.

Digg gets ~70 million US visits per month (Compete), with 50% traffic from the US (Alexa), and average ~5 page views per user (Compete & Alexa). So let's say 700 million page views a month.

700,000,000 * 106 = 74,200,000,000 bytes/month ~= 70 gigabytes/month.

Slicehost charges $20 for 100 gigabytes/month. I'm assuming Digg pays for unmetered bandwidth, which should come out to a lot less.

So, I guess the answer is - not much.

You left out the fact that use gzip to compress their pages. So the real answer is - even less.

Yep, I remembered about compression after I posted.

So did you have anything to do with this hidden message? :p

I knew about it, not much more than that. Timeless, our dba, put it in (digg user philovivero).

How does that work? Is the page sent gzipped and my computer un-gzips it? (and what specifically does that..do browsers do that?)

Yep. The browser sends an "Accept-Encoding" header as part of its request (with a list of what it supports). And the server can respond back with one of the encodings listed. Most modern browser support compression I believe.

Thats pretty kickin. If I made websites for a living I would look into that further.

Most people who work on large scale websites know about it :)

gzipping saves bandwidth at the cost of cpu cycles. So it may or may not be a good idea, depending on what you are trying to save.

  58667 digg-orig.html
  14585 digg-orig.html.gz
  58560 digg-noegg.html
  14524 digg-noegg.html.gz

61 bytes.

Obviously Digg didn't read the Sequoia presentation. Cutting that out would extend their runway by at least 2 seconds.

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