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Comment by ckdarby | Hacker News Reader

> "Over the past year, electricity prices have gone up 2.5 times, which, with a large number of servers, gives a significant increase in costs that we have no way to balance."

They could have reinvested the earnings in the past to run a more cost effective solution to prevent this happening today. I have seen this countless times where companies will just drain the business of cash and leave everything knowing it'll die eventually in the long run.

They had options like reducing the max file size, the number of files, the retention period, etc. They hadn't posted a blog outlining any plans or features for ~6 years.

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> They could have reinvested the earnings in the past to run a more cost effective solution to prevent this happening today.

Do you know this for a fact? Assuming there's some simple obvious solution to a declining long-lived business, is questionable.

Perhaps the creators have better things to do and ran the service till it was no longer viable.

Which seems entirely reasonable for a free service?

Or, put another way they built a successful business and it funded their retirement. Businesses are built by people and don’t literally have a life of their own. Maybe the people enjoyed the revenues and have moved on to their life outside this business and the cash flow is no longer worth the hassle. Seems like a happy ending to me. But, I’m also not as ambitious in business as I used to be and see things differently in my old age.

> reducing the max file size

Files are only getting bigger over time. Reducing the max file size will leave even fewer people using the service.

If 10% of your users impose 90% of costs, without providing a similarly exaggerated share of income... I'd LOVE to fire those customers.

The way these sites usually work is that there‘s a small group of people uploading a lot and distributing these links everywhere (All the piracy boards). That‘s what gets people to your site and in turn ad impressions.

Getting rid of your top uploaded will not be beneficial to your bottom line.

I'm aware. What I'm saying is you want the guy uploading, like, tons of old arcade ROMs or comic book scans or something... not 50GB bluray rips.

But it’s fine for a business to end. Owners are not obligated to fight a losing battle until they’re overleveraged and bankrupt. Often those measures make failure come faster. Pull a salary while you wind down and wait for the candle to burn out.

An operating loss is still an operating loss even if you have savings.

It's incredible gymnastics we've seen business leaders achieve in the last 3 years. I can't tell you how many times I've heard the numerous renditions of "we're struggling because of SARS/Russia/Energy/Supply-Chains/China/Trump/etc". Not once have I heard "we're struggling because we focused on big bonuses and dividends instead of growth and business security, and we are seeing the repercussions of that". Poor preparation leads to piss poor performance. Basic business acumen.

"When the tide goes out we all learn who was swimming naked"

While very true, sometimes failure/shutting down/bankruptcy is a deliberate decision as it maximizes profit elsewhere. <the latest crisis> is just an excuse to save reputation for an action a large portion of the population would view as pure greed void of morality. Its fairly common in the startup world in the form of being acquired by companies like amazon/google/microsoft and then shutting down not long after. The acquiring company gets many benefits from this including substantial realized tax losses (among many other tax opportunities), accelerated absorption of assets (or cash if they liquidate), customer relationships, and valuable employees, etc. This can be especially profitable for large companies during poor economic times as they can acquire at usually significant discounts.

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