Is Reddit still run to be profitable? It always seems like it fits more with a wikipedia type model of donations etc.
moot (of 4chan) said a while back that Cloudflare is one of the main reasons 4chan is still around these days.
Maybe that changes for a few K a month?
As a practical example, you might have an image on your webserver. When it goes viral on reddit, the request for the image hits the CDN first, not your servers (that's why they call it reverse proxying), they see that they don't have a cached version of the file, or their cached version has expired, so the CDN sends a request to your server, copies the file, and then proceeds to serve that file from their cache for the next million user requests or until the cache is set to expire (usually 24 or so hours, more than long enough for the traffic hitting your image url to die down).
Basically, the CDN made it so your actual servers (and thus your host bandwidth bill) served one request. Not 1 million requests.
Now typically you will foot the bandwidth bill for the CDN as well, but Cloudflare has a tiered pricing structure that is well below the rest of the competition. See moot (owner of 4chan) talk about cost savings here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6682324
Just saying that when I contacted them, they were clear that we shouldn't use them for images or media, and their general ToS agrees.
Their enterprise pricing starts cheap so if they throw in "unlimited bandwidth for everything" then it'd be quite a good deal.
Media is the primary purpose for CDNs. The performance boost comes from a global network caching the media files so when requests are made for the resources, the end user downloads the media from the nearest CDN node instead of your server that is potentially on the other side of the world. It doesn't matter quite so much to have non-media (such as the page html) served locally because the size of an html page is generally significantly smaller than the media embedded in the page.
From the small amount of research I've done on the Cloudflare service just now, it doesn't seem very transparent how exactly it works. I've found information on 4chan and imgur using them to serve billions of CDN requests, but others saying don't rely on their CDN. So who knows, maybe it's on a case by case basis.
...Additionally, the purpose of CloudFlare's Service is to proxy web content, not store data. Using an account primarily as an online storage space, including the storage or caching of a disproportionate percentage of pictures, movies, audio files, or other non-HTML content, is prohibited...
CloudFlare is not free, nowhere near it, if you're Imgur or 4chan. moot has emphasised this before. It's expensive.
Source where moot says cloudflare's low cost keeps 4chan running https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6682324.
There used to be a domain for imgur like imgur.voxcdn.com to help people get around WebSense.
They have a lot of direct traffic to compensate for the cheap hotlinking.
I recently saw a front page post that was just a Taco Bell sign that was 20 years old. A fluff bullshit post with little discernable value. Now I don't suggest that the user paid to post it, that sort of stuff would be found out quickly, but it was up voted enough to get it into the hot\rising queue and by virtue of appearing there it made it to the front page.
We know that in the early days the admins/founders used fake accounts to simulate activity on the site and I not imagine that has changed. So they use these accounts to boost up votes and almost guarantee a front page position.
They are also happy to remove front page posts that advertisers don't like e.g sears
Of course they've must have cached thumbnails before but this seems like a giant expansion that must consume rather much resources... or maybe they did this before and just didn't expose the functionality, but it seems tied to their new mobile webpage
Contrary to popular belief Reddit is not some grass-roots operations.
Sure, they are off-leash now, and have been for years. And that may even be the long-term intent. But if someone owns you, they can always change the status quo.
Tell that to Myspace. A property as expensive as reddit has to have a clear road to profitability or it's going to get the axe. Conde Nast isn't running a charity.