How much does it cost to run a site that deals with pirated content? (leminal.space)

submitted 11 months ago by CorrodedCranium@leminal.space to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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Gnarly-Repacks is requesting donations for the renewal bill for their site and I know FitGirl sporadically makes requests for donations as well. It makes me curious what range of expenses do sites like these incur and what they are.

I do vaguely recall The Pirate Bay 2013 documentary TPB AFK talking a bit about their revenue but I don't know if they talked much about their expenses.

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[-] lukas@lemmy.haigner.me 42 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Hard if not impossible to say. It depends on what they host. Hosting also gets real expensive if they make poor choices.

If they choose to host their WordPress piracy website on WordPress.com, then that's a shit idea. They're overpriced as hell, even with an annual discount. 300 € annually is WordPress.com's discounted price for a somewhat usable, but still restricted WordPress instance. Furthermore, pirates face the risk that hosting providers terminate their account and keep the money, so long billing periods are risky.

They accept that risk to save some cash, and use WordPress.com. Okay, now what? WordPress.com terminates the account at the start of the new billing period and keeps the money. How sweet. Pay 300 € for the privilege of another restricted WordPress instance. Annual spending: 600 € for what could've been 21.12 € annually with a dumb simple Hetzner webspace.

You may think that this is impossible, nobody is dumb enough to spend 600 € when a 21.12 € solution is good enough, right? Look no further than any company that lifts and shifts apps into the cloud that weren't designed to run in the cloud. Expensive as hell for no fucking reason other than it's in the cloud now. Or this poor fella who got a $ 30 gift card for saving their employer $ 500,000 with five clicks.

[-] NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 12 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

300 euros annually is not horribly overpriced for what wordpress provides.

50 gigs of storage, "unlimited visitors and bandwidth" and five nines uptime costs money. Those all cost money and having the staff on call to maintain it is very much worth the price. I haven't priced anything out recently, but 300 euros a year seems "reasonable" for the convenience aspects.

That said, if you don't need the five nines of uptime you can get away with dropping a lot of that. I tend to not check the actual group sites all that often, but a quick check of Fitgirl's site looks like it is blogs and links. Probably gets hit with a LOT of DDOSes and attacks on the regular but not much bandwidth needs.

Because people will very often vastly overpay for what they need. But this seems "reasonable" for what it is and, if you need it, having one check to write a month/year is likely worth whatever overhead wordpress throws on top (which, considering the feature set, probably isn't all that much).

But yeah, you hit the nail on the head with hosting sites likely to drop piracy sites.

[-] lukas@lemmy.haigner.me 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I didn't know that. Yeah, that sounds reasonable if they need it. It's probably best to view my original comment from the perspective that they don't need these benefits.