Now, I'm not talking about exactly the same thing here. And I don't actually run any sites at this point in my life.

That being said, I considered setting up a site to host my stuff. Mostly writing, some art, just a kind of vanity project that would let me distribute files to friends and family with an easy link instead of having to send them files when requested.

So, I could have used any hosting service since it's all legal files. I own all the copy rights, and that means the price starts out pretty low. I never looked into what the less stringent services would cost.

But, it worked out that it would cost me about 300 a year between domain name, file hosting, and ssl certificate, etc at the cheapest rates I could find.

Which is why I didn't do it, lol. It's way cheaper to just deal with the hassles of sending files via telegram or whatever. That only costs time.

I've a friend that runs a site for their business though. He's shelling out about a grand a year, and doesn't host any files for download. That's with some fancy templates, and some kind of security thing that I've never asked about the specifics of. He was a bit surprised how much it cost.

So I suspect that if someone wanted to actually host a large amount of files like movies, games, and music would need, they'd be looking at that range as a minimum cost. The storage space is fairly expensive once you're into terabytes, or so I was told.

But I don't think the repack folks do it that way. They use torrents, which means things are cheaper. So the costs of that are probably closer to the bottom end of the scale where I would have been

Again, this is not the same thing, and I'm guesstimating off of research I did years ago, so don't take it as some kind of expert talking.