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Comment by alialkhatib | Hacker News Reader

I'm skeptical about the longevity of a site that operates entirely on donations, but seeing that you offer the source code for free (and it runs on PHP, which is arguably pretty well-supported), and your license is reasonable (if crass, but who cares?)...

This is really great. Thanks for posting this.

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Hi, PDFy owner here. I've been running a number of services for 3 years now, without running into financial problems (see http://cryto.net/, http://cryto.net/~joepie91, http://cryto.net/~joepie91/projectlist). My biggest issue has actually been lack of time, rather than money :)

I've gotten pretty good over the years at running stuff on a shoestring budget (my current hosting expenses are around 100 euro a month for everything together at a large number of hosts, and I have plenty of resources to spare), and as far as I can predict PDFy won't be running into any issues any time soon.

I should add that it definitely helps to custom-develop everything - generic solutions tend to come with a large amount of (resource) overhead, which make it harder to run it on a small budget. By doing just about everything custom, the overhead is minimal. Traffic is dirt cheap nowadays if you know where to look, so that's not really a concern anymore either.

hey -- I just loaded the page and I'm guessing 1/2 of the docs on the front page where copyrighted and uploaded w/o perms. I could be wrong.

In either case, you probably want to get very acquainted w/ the dmca and register an agent [1]; hopefully you know all about this but it's worth running requirements to stay w/in the dmca past a lawyer

[1] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101028/15533611640/damn-...

Similar content can be found on Scribd, with the additional property of Scribd making money on said content.

https://pdf.yt/tos -- You might want to get a lawyer to check if there are any pitfalls when using tongue-in-cheek terms of service and whether you wouldn't need to require people to accept ToS in a more nagging way.

What do you mean by "Traffic is dirt cheap if you know where to look"

Are you talking about where to go find traffic for your website? Do you mind sharing?

He's literally referring to bandwidth. Transit to get data from A (PDFy) to B (the visitor)

:-)

As MitchellRobert already pointed out, I'm refering to traffic in the sense of data traffic (commonly called bandwidth). A very common remark I've gotten is "but what about the bandwidth usage?!", but nowadays it's not hard to get a few terabytes of monthly traffic allowance for under $10.

For this particular VPS, I'm paying $9.30 a month, and it includes 2TB of montly traffic. Cheaper offers exist, and there are always providers like OVH that genuinely offer unmetered traffic on the cheap (as long as it's used for a legitimate purpose, eg. serving hosted files).

Having licensed a small project or two under the WTFPL, it is delightfully permissive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL

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