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Comment by sweca | Hacker News Reader

Thanks! It's been operating for the past 3 years without any ads or third-party trackers, and I don't have plans to shut it down for the forseeable future.

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No one ever starts these things with plans to shut them down, the question is how much money do you have for this right now, how much money is it burning per unit of time, and how long will that last if no one pays for a paid plan. I'm not asking you to answer those questions, but pointing out the reality of the economics of the situation. If an image goes viral, can you pay a 10x or 100x hosting bill? For how long? How much are you commiting to spend before shutting it down becomes an attractive option?

These are good questions to ask. Right now, the monetization strategy is profitable.

If an image does go viral, which has happened before on popular Reddit posts that hit the front page, the infrastructure should be able to handle it for a while, and it should not be costly.

you should protect yourself from free plans going viral and costing you more than you'd like with rate limiting rules of some kind.

I see your point, but the business model can sustain a large influx in free signups. I will keep this in mind though.

I can, right now, go find dedicated servers with 1gbps port that will deliver continuous 800Mbps of traffic 24x7, for $35/month. Bandwidth is not as expensive as people think.

> Bandwidth is not as expensive as people think

Now we only need to explain that to AWS folks

You’ve intrigued me! Can you provide a link to such a hosting option? I’ve got some side projects I’d like to explore! Thanks in advance

https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/

Wholesaleinternet.net is just 1 of many places.

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