3 ms·

It is certainly not free at "hundreds of thousands of requests per minute" scale.

doctaj 1y ago
Wouldn’t Cloudflare’s free CDN handle that? That kind of traffic is dirt cheap.
hansvm 1y ago
It's not free, but it's not expensive. Server load at that scale is measured in single-digit dollars per month, and bandwidth _might_ require two pipes with enough images being loaded. Multiply by 20 for replication and latency issues, and you're still only talking $200/month. As a ballpark, even bad ad impressions bring in $10/mille, maybe $1/mille for something unintrusive. Does Anandtech get more than 200k impressions per month? If we're talking about a "hundreds of thousands of requests per minute" scale then I would certainly hope so.
- Scoundreller 1y ago
  That’s the irony: forum traffic has shit cpm, but that’s what they’re keeping alive (for now). Users coming direct from organic search to an article tends to have the best: they’re more likely to be buyers and/or find the ads interesting. Main downside with ads on tech sites is their users block ads a lot.
- ivape 1y ago
  Why would anyone take down a site like this? The content is done, the site is page ranked to the top, it’s passive money.
  - ethbr1 1y ago
    Because their revenue department doesn’t talk to their content department.
bravesoul2 1y ago
Embarrassingly parallelisable around the globe and embarrassingly easy technically to point DNS to a CDN. Even if you have a server doing something 100k rpm isn't insane amount of traffic to handle. It requires a relatively modest server.
kachapopopow 1y ago
It's most definitely free - cloudflare won't even ask you for the business plan (as long as their CDN's are caching properly). I had a site serving 90tb/month on a free plan (99.87% of the traffic was cached).
- mike_d 1y ago
  What if you care about your users privacy and security and don't use Cloudflare?
  - horseradish7k 1y ago
    can't have your cake and eat it too

Wouldn’t Cloudflare’s free CDN handle that? That kind of traffic is dirt cheap.

It's not free, but it's not expensive. Server load at that scale is measured in single-digit dollars per month, and bandwidth _might_ require two pipes with enough images being loaded. Multiply by 20 for replication and latency issues, and you're still only talking $200/month. As a ballpark, even bad ad impressions bring in $10/mille, maybe $1/mille for something unintrusive. Does Anandtech get more than 200k impressions per month? If we're talking about a "hundreds of thousands of requests per minute" scale then I would certainly hope so.

Scoundreller 1y ago
That’s the irony: forum traffic has shit cpm, but that’s what they’re keeping alive (for now). Users coming direct from organic search to an article tends to have the best: they’re more likely to be buyers and/or find the ads interesting. Main downside with ads on tech sites is their users block ads a lot.
ivape 1y ago
Why would anyone take down a site like this? The content is done, the site is page ranked to the top, it’s passive money.
- ethbr1 1y ago
  Because their revenue department doesn’t talk to their content department.

bravesoul2 1y ago

Embarrassingly parallelisable around the globe and embarrassingly easy technically to point DNS to a CDN. Even if you have a server doing something 100k rpm isn't insane amount of traffic to handle. It requires a relatively modest server.

kachapopopow 1y ago

It's most definitely free - cloudflare won't even ask you for the business plan (as long as their CDN's are caching properly). I had a site serving 90tb/month on a free plan (99.87% of the traffic was cached).

mike_d 1y ago
What if you care about your users privacy and security and don't use Cloudflare?
- horseradish7k 1y ago
  can't have your cake and eat it too