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Comment by bawolff | Hacker News Reader

This is a rediculous thing to say. You think the interest off 250 million would be enough to run the wikipedia website?

Do you have any experience operating web properties at scale to come to this conclusion? Did you base this on anything at all?

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I don't agree that it's pure greed but hosting costs for the Wikimedia Foundation in the FY2022-2023 were $3.1 million. [1][2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

[2] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/W... (page 4, pdf page 6 for expenses)

Sure, but hosting costs are a very small part of the costs of running a website (and tbh, its super unclear what hosting costs do and do not include. Do they include the cost of servers? Is it just peering costs and renting rackspace? At the very least they do not include staff. Servers are pretty useless if you don't have anyone to hook them up and manage them)

Hosting costs are £3m, but total expenditure is $160m - which obviously isn't covered by the interest on $250m.

I don't know what it takes at the scale of something like Wikipedia, but at my own scale, a single/self-employed developer, yes, hosting costs are a small part, but then I have to eat, a place to live, replace hardware, pay bills and taxes and much much more, things none of my sites could exist without.

Hosting is nothing without coders and maintainers, regardless of if the main content is contributed free, and decent coders and maintainers, software and hardware engineers, aren't cheap and don't count as hosting costs.

1M$/year used to be enough.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

Why stop there, the site cost $0/year back in 1999.

The growth of spending does not reflect the growth of usage or content, not even close.

Hosting 80GB of data? Absolutely. Even if it was 800GB.

Umm, its roughly 500 terabytes if you include uploaded files, but that is besides the point.

Hosting a bunch of static data is really easy but only a small part of running a site like wikipedia.

the expensive bit of serving big websites is the ads, the tracking, the analytics, the vast internal teams focused on endless avb testing etc. if you boil Wikipedia down it's mostly static pages with a crud editor. it's cached to the moon and back, most pages don't change. the pages are tiny. they're not paying aws for bandwidth.

> most pages don't change

Generally the pages that are viewed a lot change a lot. Sure, there is a long tail of mostly static pages, but that is not super relavent.

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