I agree: this is penny pinching of the worst kind. The retail cloud costs for storage and traffic are cents per GB. Media would largely be served via CDN. It

I agree: this is penny pinching of the worst kind. The retail cloud costs for storage and traffic are cents per GB. Media would largely be served via CDN. It would take relatively few servers to run a mothballed DPReview. We're probably talking mere thousands of dollars per year, at a guess. Give them the benefit of the doubt and say it's 5 figures. That's still nothing. And whatever costs there are would be completely defrayed by ads anyway. So this brings us to the one big cost: labor. If you disallow new posts then you basically have no content moderation costs. Other than that you're keeping up some static pages and a read-only forum. That's trivial. You'd roll that into any group who is responsible for maintaining a large number of sites with negligible overall cost. Overall I'd say the total cost of running this is less than one employee. And if I'm wrong, it's because the site still generates a lot of traffic, which kind of defeats the argument that it needs to be shut down. As for the storage, I'd reminded of the Geocities shutdown. What was once a lot of storage was described as "gigabytes". It would've quite literally been a case of someone going over there with a thumb drive. DPReview isn't dissimilar. A lot of content is very old (ie small resolution and file sizes).