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Comment by quest88 | Hacker News Reader

I invite you to run your own popular blog on your own hardware and pay for the costs. It sounds like you don't know what the true costs are.

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I do run a popular blog, and a $5 a month Digital Ocean droplet handles millions of requests per month without breaking a sweat.

If every user is collecting 36mb a day like in the story here, your droplet wouldn’t even be capable of serving 500 users a month without hitting your bandwidth limit. With their current rates, your one million requests would cost you around 10 million USD.

30 * 500 * 36mb = 560gb and I have 1tb a month on my apparently $6 droplet

Correction - from my billing page it's $4.50 a month, from the resize page it is $6 so I'm guessing I am grandfathered in to some older pricing

That's ridiculously big quantity of data to serve a seldomly updated blog just because the client doesn't want (or know how, or think about) to implement an easy and old http method.

Imagine the petabytes of data transferred through the internet saved if a couple RSS clients added that method.

If OP enabled gzip then this 36mb would be 13mb.

If OP reduced 30 months of posts in rss to 12 months then this 13mb would be 5mb a day.

Using Cloudflare free plan and this static content is cached without any problem.

Yeah, but also... if RSS readers behaved correctly, it would be 512 kb. (170 kb with gzip, if she didn't enable it like you imply – I'm too lazy to check, but I assumed it was on.)

I think making clients behave correctly is much more sustainable solution, although we could do better than doing so at the cost of the end users.

This entire thread is a vivid illustration of why software is so shitty in general these days.

OP has never said that this is about financial aspects of things.

Yews, it's about enforcing their preference on how others should interact with OP's published site feed, on principle. Which is always an uphill battle.

It's about enforcing that people follow standards. Which is still an uphill battle, but at least it's based in something sane. Their work on this has resulted in improvements to a whole slew of popular feed readers that should make life easier for a chunk of the internet, not just OP's own site.

I serve 30tb/month for $30/mo on my own colocated hw

Sounds like you don't know how to scale for cheap.

And since I've ran integrations that connected over 500 companies. I know what a rouge client actually looks like and 72 requests per day and I wouldn't even notice.

Good on you champ.

More like a skill issue or just decision to make your life more difficult.

It is free and easy to scale this kind of text based blog.

> More like a skill issue

Hey, I think you mistook HN for Reddit.

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