5 ms·

> Li correctly points out that the Archive's budget, in the range of $25-30M/year, is vastly lower than any comparable website: By owning its hardware, using th

> Li correctly points out that the Archive's budget, in the range of $25-30M/year, is vastly lower than any comparable website: By owning its hardware, using the PetaBox high-density architecture, avoiding air conditioning costs, and using open-source software, the Archive achieves a storage cost efficiency that is orders of magnitude better than commercial cloud rates. That’s impressive. Wikipedia spends $185m per year and the Seattle public library spends $102m. Maybe not comparable exactly, but $30m per year seems inexpensive for the memory of the world…

AdamN 9mo ago
I think the culture is one of 'we are doing this for all humankind' and when you get just a few smart people bought in on that level of commitment and they're trying to be lean (and also for sure underpaying themselves compared to what they might make at Big Tech) then you can get impressive results.
- exe34 9mo ago
  aren't we told all the time though, that a board of directors beholden to shareholders and a god given edict to make numbers go up are the only way to do things efficiently, to be lean and productive? are you telling me that when people find there's a need for something to happen, they make it happen? for the good of mankind? no billionaires?
  - votepaunchy 9mo ago
    [flagged]
    - delusional 9mo ago
      > But if all we needed was to hold hands and sing kumbaya then Africa would be Wakanda. Are you of the impression that the problems African nations are facing is that they're holding hands and singing too much? Are the Africans just lazy?
    - exe34 9mo ago
      it's literally the BS we're given for privatisation. Here in the UK, the train network is shittier than ever and there's no competition. the water companies are literally pouring shit into the sea while paying themselves billions in dividends and putting the companies in massive debt. we were told the profit motive and competition would make them efficient.
      - komali2 9mo ago
        > we were told the profit motive and competition would make them efficient. They believe their own propaganda unfortunately.
        exe34 9mo ago
        I just find it odd that people would still defend them like this. They don't seem to realise you can buy boot polish in tins nowadays. but maybe they like the fresh taste of dirt on it.
      - fragmede 9mo ago
        They have! They're way more efficient at making their owners rich. Before, there was this whole "having to provide a service" thing that cost money and drove down the efficiency of moving money from the public to their wallets. Now, it's way better!
      - abanana 9mo ago
        Indeed, this was taught to me in the late-90s in A-level Economics as absolute undisputed fact. The path forward had become clear whereas it hadn't been understood previously. It annoys me now, looking back and knowing it's such an incredibly naive take on how capitalism works. Was it naivety on the part of the teacher, or propaganda slipped into the curriculum? I don't know. A separate issue worth mentioning is that the water companies (as opposed to trains, gas, electricity, Royal Mail, etc) don't fall under this because they were privatised as regional monopolies. The government didn't even (pretend to) attempt to create competition.
        9mo ago
- sshine 9mo ago
  I look at the 1990s picture of Brewster Kahle and think: He surely didn't get paid as much as me, but what did I do? Play insignificant roles in various software subscription services, many of which are gone now. And what did he do? Held on to an idea for decades. The combined value of The Internet Archive -- whether we think just the infrastructure, just the value of the data, or the actual utility value to mankind -- vastly outperforms an individual contributor's at almost every well-paying internet startup. At the simple cost of not getting to pocket that value. I wish I believed in something this much.
  - fragmede 9mo ago
    If you think that's fucked up, do you know how little we pay teachers? Especially preschool-K? Clearly money is just a metric for how much moneying the money had been able to money. Goodhart out it another way: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
    - toomuchtodo 9mo ago
      1k teachers in Arizona have quit in the last six months because of this. Over 1,000 Arizona teachers resigning plays a part in shortage - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46728151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46728151 - January 2026
    - sshine 9mo ago
      I was a CS teacher for the past two years, so yes. I did it for quality of life reasons while my son learned to walk. But I almost doubled my salary going back to being a software dev.
- miki123211 9mo ago
  You can trade off cloud costs for developer time. AWS is priced as if your alternative was doing everything in house, with Silicon Valley salaries. If your goal isn't "go to market quickly and make sure our idea works, no matter the cost", it may not be the right fit for you. If you're a solo developer, non-profit, or another organization with excess volunteer time and little money, you can very often do what AWS does for a fraction of the cost.
  - storystarling 9mo ago
    I've found that for data-intensive workloads it isn't just a trade-off—the markup on egress and storage often makes the business model mathematically unviable. I'm bootstrapping a service with heavy image generation and the unit economics simply don't work on AWS.
vern001 9mo ago
I love libraries and museums, but I think that Internet Archive has done an incredible job. If I didn’t have a job or responsibilities and was told that I was allowed to just be curious and have fun, I would spend a tremendous amount of time just reading, listening, watching, playing, etc. on IA. Visiting IA is the closest feeling I can get to visiting the library when I was young. The library used to be the only place where you could just read swaths of magazines, newspapers, and books, and also check out music- for free. Also, I love random stuff. IA has digitized tape recordings that used to play in K-Mart. While Wikipedia spends time culling history that people have submitted, IA keeps it. They understand the duty they have when you donate part of human history to them, instead of some person that didn’t care about some part of history just deleting it. IA is not just its storage and the Wayback machine, even though those things are incredible and a massive part of its value to humanity. It’s someone that just cares. At the end of the day, big companies just need to make profit. Do big companies care about your digitized 8-track collection you have in cloud storage? One day maybe they will take it away from you to avoid a lawsuit or to get you to rent music from them. And your local NAS and backups? Do you think your niche archive will survive a space heater safety mechanism failure, a pipe bursting, when your house is collateral damage in a war, or your accidental death? I understand wanting to keep your own copies of things just-in-case, but if you want those things to survive, why not also host them at IA if others generally would find joy or knowledge from them?
- fragmede 9mo ago
  My lil NAS won't survive, but do you also believe the IA's San Francisco office will survive"the big one" when it hits the San Andreas fault? Geographically redudndant storage is the only way to do it, and that goes goes for installations big and small.
  - CursedSilicon 9mo ago
    IA has redundant backups in Europe
    - deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
zozbot234 9mo ago
Wikipedia is not a pure hosting operation, it's trying to foster a worldwide community-of-practice of volunteer contributors that can be sustainable in the long term, and that does take quite a bit of spending. I have no idea why so many people keep getting this wrong.
- swores 9mo ago
  > "I have no idea why so many people keep getting this wrong." To me it seems a perfectly natural effect of nearly everyone using it as a website which holds lots of information, and very few people comparatively have any experience with the community side, so people assume that what they see is what Wikipedia is. Not many people are spending time reading reports on organisation costs breakdowns for Wikipedia, so the only way they'd know is if someone like you actively tells them. I personally also assumed server costs were the vast majority, with legal costs a probable distant second - but your comment has inspired me to actually go and look for a breakdown of their spending, so thanks. Edit: FY24-25, "infrastructure" was just 49.2% of their budget - from https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2024-2025/Budget_Details#Budget_Breakdown https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...
  - miki123211 9mo ago
    Wikipedia is also uniquely cacheable. I suspect that 95+% of visits to Wikipedia don't actually require them to run any PHP code, but are instead just served from some cache, as each Wikipedia user viewing a given article (if they're not logged in) sees basically the same thing. This is in contrast to E.G. a social network, which needs to calculate timelines per user. Even if there's no machine learning and your algorithm is "most recent posts first", there's still plenty of computation involved. Mastodon is a good example here.
    - fragmede 9mo ago
      The move away from "most recent posts first" is because that's actually harder at scale than the algorithmic timeline.
bakugo 9mo ago
> Wikipedia spends $185m per year Only a small fraction of that is spent on actually hosting the website. The rest goes into the pockets of the owners and their friends. You can do a lot with very little if your primary goal isn't to enrich yourself.
- Atreiden 9mo ago
  Do you have a source for that? Being a 503c, they're required to disclose their expenditures, among other things. CN gives them a perfect score, and the expense ratio section puts their program spend at 77.4% of the budget https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/200049703#overall-rating-section-2 https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/200049703#overall-ratin... Worth mentioning that Wikipedia gets an order of magnitude more traffic than the Internet archive.
  - dpedu 9mo ago
    In their latest available annual report, the Wikimedia Foundation reported that in 2024 they brought in $185M in revenue/donations, of which they spent $178M. Of that $178M, $106M was spent on salaries and benefits, and $26M on awards and grants. So, that accounts for 75% of their spending. "Internet hosting" is listed at only $3M though there are other line items such as "Professional service expenses" at $13M that probably relate to running Wikipedia too. Scroll down to the "Statement of activities (audited)" section: https://wikimediafoundation.org/annualreports/2023-2024-annual-report/ https://wikimediafoundation.org/annualreports/2023-2024-annu...
    - rrr_oh_man 9mo ago
      > $106M was spent on salaries and benefits …across 650 employees, which is $166K on average.
  - bakugo 9mo ago
    > Worth mentioning that Wikipedia gets an order of magnitude more traffic than the Internet archive. With an order of magnitude less data to host, though. The entirety of Wikipedia is less than 1PB [1], while the entirety of IA is 175+ PB [2]. Traffic is relatively cheap, especially for a very cache-friendly website like Wikipedia. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia [2] https://archive.org/about/ https://archive.org/about/
delusional 9mo ago
I don't think it's really fair to compare IA to a real library. The Seattle public library for example spends 76% of their operating budget on employees, most of who are doing public services work. The second major expense for a real library is paying for books and materials, again IA doesn't do any of that. It's not fair to compare an institution with a website.
- mc32 9mo ago
  They’re both institutions but one wants recognition and nice buildings the other wants to be an immutable archive unlike Wikipædia which curates and memory holes issues that don’t align with its thinking. The other one just marches on without flashy managers at the helm making life easy for themselves.
  - komali2 9mo ago
    The nice buildings provide a public space sheltered from the elements to millions of people a year. I love the IA but it really isn't a worthy comparison.
  - buildbot 9mo ago
    Seattle public library is also an archive as well as a provider of many beautiful and free third spaces. The downtown library is very cool. I bet there’s stuff in the stacks there that is not digitized anywhere.
- entangledqubit 9mo ago
  I thought the comparison was unfair as well. Physical libraries also tend to be the defacto life help desk for a lot of people out there.
dpedu 9mo ago
I'm surprised no-air-conditioning datacenters aren't more common. It's a huge cost, and people love to complain about related water usage. I recall some Microsoft employees running a similar experiment years ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20090219172931/https://blogs.msdn.com/the_power_of_software/archive/2008/09/19/intense-computing-or-in-tents-computing.aspx https://web.archive.org/web/20090219172931/https://blogs.msd...

AdamN 9mo ago

I think the culture is one of 'we are doing this for all humankind' and when you get just a few smart people bought in on that level of commitment and they're trying to be lean (and also for sure underpaying themselves compared to what they might make at Big Tech) then you can get impressive results.

exe34 9mo ago
aren't we told all the time though, that a board of directors beholden to shareholders and a god given edict to make numbers go up are the only way to do things efficiently, to be lean and productive? are you telling me that when people find there's a need for something to happen, they make it happen? for the good of mankind? no billionaires?
- votepaunchy 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  - delusional 9mo ago
    > But if all we needed was to hold hands and sing kumbaya then Africa would be Wakanda. Are you of the impression that the problems African nations are facing is that they're holding hands and singing too much? Are the Africans just lazy?
  - exe34 9mo ago
    it's literally the BS we're given for privatisation. Here in the UK, the train network is shittier than ever and there's no competition. the water companies are literally pouring shit into the sea while paying themselves billions in dividends and putting the companies in massive debt. we were told the profit motive and competition would make them efficient.
    - komali2 9mo ago
      > we were told the profit motive and competition would make them efficient. They believe their own propaganda unfortunately.
      - exe34 9mo ago
        I just find it odd that people would still defend them like this. They don't seem to realise you can buy boot polish in tins nowadays. but maybe they like the fresh taste of dirt on it.
    - fragmede 9mo ago
      They have! They're way more efficient at making their owners rich. Before, there was this whole "having to provide a service" thing that cost money and drove down the efficiency of moving money from the public to their wallets. Now, it's way better!
    - abanana 9mo ago
      Indeed, this was taught to me in the late-90s in A-level Economics as absolute undisputed fact. The path forward had become clear whereas it hadn't been understood previously. It annoys me now, looking back and knowing it's such an incredibly naive take on how capitalism works. Was it naivety on the part of the teacher, or propaganda slipped into the curriculum? I don't know. A separate issue worth mentioning is that the water companies (as opposed to trains, gas, electricity, Royal Mail, etc) don't fall under this because they were privatised as regional monopolies. The government didn't even (pretend to) attempt to create competition.
      - 9mo ago
sshine 9mo ago
I look at the 1990s picture of Brewster Kahle and think: He surely didn't get paid as much as me, but what did I do? Play insignificant roles in various software subscription services, many of which are gone now. And what did he do? Held on to an idea for decades. The combined value of The Internet Archive -- whether we think just the infrastructure, just the value of the data, or the actual utility value to mankind -- vastly outperforms an individual contributor's at almost every well-paying internet startup. At the simple cost of not getting to pocket that value. I wish I believed in something this much.
- fragmede 9mo ago
  If you think that's fucked up, do you know how little we pay teachers? Especially preschool-K? Clearly money is just a metric for how much moneying the money had been able to money. Goodhart out it another way: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
  - toomuchtodo 9mo ago
    1k teachers in Arizona have quit in the last six months because of this. Over 1,000 Arizona teachers resigning plays a part in shortage - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46728151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46728151 - January 2026
  - sshine 9mo ago
    I was a CS teacher for the past two years, so yes. I did it for quality of life reasons while my son learned to walk. But I almost doubled my salary going back to being a software dev.
miki123211 9mo ago
You can trade off cloud costs for developer time. AWS is priced as if your alternative was doing everything in house, with Silicon Valley salaries. If your goal isn't "go to market quickly and make sure our idea works, no matter the cost", it may not be the right fit for you. If you're a solo developer, non-profit, or another organization with excess volunteer time and little money, you can very often do what AWS does for a fraction of the cost.
- storystarling 9mo ago
  I've found that for data-intensive workloads it isn't just a trade-off—the markup on egress and storage often makes the business model mathematically unviable. I'm bootstrapping a service with heavy image generation and the unit economics simply don't work on AWS.

vern001 9mo ago

I love libraries and museums, but I think that Internet Archive has done an incredible job. If I didn’t have a job or responsibilities and was told that I was allowed to just be curious and have fun, I would spend a tremendous amount of time just reading, listening, watching, playing, etc. on IA. Visiting IA is the closest feeling I can get to visiting the library when I was young. The library used to be the only place where you could just read swaths of magazines, newspapers, and books, and also check out music- for free. Also, I love random stuff. IA has digitized tape recordings that used to play in K-Mart. While Wikipedia spends time culling history that people have submitted, IA keeps it. They understand the duty they have when you donate part of human history to them, instead of some person that didn’t care about some part of history just deleting it. IA is not just its storage and the Wayback machine, even though those things are incredible and a massive part of its value to humanity. It’s someone that just cares. At the end of the day, big companies just need to make profit. Do big companies care about your digitized 8-track collection you have in cloud storage? One day maybe they will take it away from you to avoid a lawsuit or to get you to rent music from them. And your local NAS and backups? Do you think your niche archive will survive a space heater safety mechanism failure, a pipe bursting, when your house is collateral damage in a war, or your accidental death? I understand wanting to keep your own copies of things just-in-case, but if you want those things to survive, why not also host them at IA if others generally would find joy or knowledge from them?

fragmede 9mo ago
My lil NAS won't survive, but do you also believe the IA's San Francisco office will survive"the big one" when it hits the San Andreas fault? Geographically redudndant storage is the only way to do it, and that goes goes for installations big and small.
- CursedSilicon 9mo ago
  IA has redundant backups in Europe
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]

zozbot234 9mo ago

Wikipedia is not a pure hosting operation, it's trying to foster a worldwide community-of-practice of volunteer contributors that can be sustainable in the long term, and that does take quite a bit of spending. I have no idea why so many people keep getting this wrong.

swores 9mo ago
> "I have no idea why so many people keep getting this wrong." To me it seems a perfectly natural effect of nearly everyone using it as a website which holds lots of information, and very few people comparatively have any experience with the community side, so people assume that what they see is what Wikipedia is. Not many people are spending time reading reports on organisation costs breakdowns for Wikipedia, so the only way they'd know is if someone like you actively tells them. I personally also assumed server costs were the vast majority, with legal costs a probable distant second - but your comment has inspired me to actually go and look for a breakdown of their spending, so thanks. Edit: FY24-25, "infrastructure" was just 49.2% of their budget - from https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2024-2025/Budget_Details#Budget_Breakdown https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...
- miki123211 9mo ago
  Wikipedia is also uniquely cacheable. I suspect that 95+% of visits to Wikipedia don't actually require them to run any PHP code, but are instead just served from some cache, as each Wikipedia user viewing a given article (if they're not logged in) sees basically the same thing. This is in contrast to E.G. a social network, which needs to calculate timelines per user. Even if there's no machine learning and your algorithm is "most recent posts first", there's still plenty of computation involved. Mastodon is a good example here.
  - fragmede 9mo ago
    The move away from "most recent posts first" is because that's actually harder at scale than the algorithmic timeline.

bakugo 9mo ago

> Wikipedia spends $185m per year Only a small fraction of that is spent on actually hosting the website. The rest goes into the pockets of the owners and their friends. You can do a lot with very little if your primary goal isn't to enrich yourself.

Atreiden 9mo ago
Do you have a source for that? Being a 503c, they're required to disclose their expenditures, among other things. CN gives them a perfect score, and the expense ratio section puts their program spend at 77.4% of the budget https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/200049703#overall-rating-section-2 https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/200049703#overall-ratin... Worth mentioning that Wikipedia gets an order of magnitude more traffic than the Internet archive.
- dpedu 9mo ago
  In their latest available annual report, the Wikimedia Foundation reported that in 2024 they brought in $185M in revenue/donations, of which they spent $178M. Of that $178M, $106M was spent on salaries and benefits, and $26M on awards and grants. So, that accounts for 75% of their spending. "Internet hosting" is listed at only $3M though there are other line items such as "Professional service expenses" at $13M that probably relate to running Wikipedia too. Scroll down to the "Statement of activities (audited)" section: https://wikimediafoundation.org/annualreports/2023-2024-annual-report/ https://wikimediafoundation.org/annualreports/2023-2024-annu...
  - rrr_oh_man 9mo ago
    > $106M was spent on salaries and benefits …across 650 employees, which is $166K on average.
- bakugo 9mo ago
  > Worth mentioning that Wikipedia gets an order of magnitude more traffic than the Internet archive. With an order of magnitude less data to host, though. The entirety of Wikipedia is less than 1PB [1], while the entirety of IA is 175+ PB [2]. Traffic is relatively cheap, especially for a very cache-friendly website like Wikipedia. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia [2] https://archive.org/about/ https://archive.org/about/

delusional 9mo ago

I don't think it's really fair to compare IA to a real library. The Seattle public library for example spends 76% of their operating budget on employees, most of who are doing public services work. The second major expense for a real library is paying for books and materials, again IA doesn't do any of that. It's not fair to compare an institution with a website.

mc32 9mo ago
They’re both institutions but one wants recognition and nice buildings the other wants to be an immutable archive unlike Wikipædia which curates and memory holes issues that don’t align with its thinking. The other one just marches on without flashy managers at the helm making life easy for themselves.
- komali2 9mo ago
  The nice buildings provide a public space sheltered from the elements to millions of people a year. I love the IA but it really isn't a worthy comparison.
- buildbot 9mo ago
  Seattle public library is also an archive as well as a provider of many beautiful and free third spaces. The downtown library is very cool. I bet there’s stuff in the stacks there that is not digitized anywhere.
entangledqubit 9mo ago
I thought the comparison was unfair as well. Physical libraries also tend to be the defacto life help desk for a lot of people out there.

dpedu 9mo ago

I'm surprised no-air-conditioning datacenters aren't more common. It's a huge cost, and people love to complain about related water usage. I recall some Microsoft employees running a similar experiment years ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20090219172931/https://blogs.msdn.com/the_power_of_software/archive/2008/09/19/intense-computing-or-in-tents-computing.aspx https://web.archive.org/web/20090219172931/https://blogs.msd...