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

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[-] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

As others have mentioned it really depends on a lot of factors.
Domain name ~$15/year Offshore server providers usually start around $30/server/month and quickly raise to thousands. Corporate application techs are usually $2k-200k/month depending on size. Anything that requires a GPU would be a custom build, dell power edge is a powerful machine you can lookup retail for. Storage Amazon s3 is $0.022 per GB/month. Keep in mind that providers usually have redundant copies in case of failure and often provide multiple releases codexes, resolutions and providing a lot more than people are requesting You often have to pay for networking as well which scales exponentially. Email accounts are usually $10/user/month any time would come from a senior developer ~120+k/year. But they are likely full stack developers so it might be closer to 200k in the US. You also need all the supporting licenses $0 in this case And servers to run development environments (double the costs above!!!) And infrastructure like Jenkins/monitoring which can scale high as well, but likely <$20k/year

Edit:The prices I quoted are for real businesses, and businesses usually negotiate rates and have discounts to close deals. This is the price for running a technical service, the fact you are disputing $5/year means you have no intent on having a real conversation about hosting fees. This is to ballpark a price for op. Stop being pedantic

[-] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

Everything is way overpriced

Why would somebody need to pay $10 for an email?

Why would one hire a developer when you're a developer yourself?

Why would one use amazon buckets when they are overpriced?

Domain names from ~$15, since when?

And the offshore servers, you can find those for even cheaper and more powerful than $5 (or many cores and 16gb ram for $5)

Also, why would you pay for jenkins when you can host it or something similar?

[-] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Domain name ~$15/year

.com starts at $10.28/year

Offshore server providers usually start around $30/server/month and quickly raise to thousands

Proxy everything from cheap offshore servers to servers from legit hosting providers with fair pricing.

Corporate application techs are usually $2k-200k/month depending on size

Ops are a tech themselves, work with techs they split donations with or pay or nothing at all, or become a tech themselves as time goes on.

Anything that requires a GPU would be a custom build, dell power edge is a powerful machine you can lookup retail for

True, but a website like FitGirl Repacks needs no GPU.

Storage Amazon s3 is $0.022 per GB/month

Don't use Amazon S3 if pricing is a concern.

Keep in mind that providers [...] often provide multiple releases codexes, resolutions and providing a lot more than people are requesting

I'm not sure what to say about that? They sure can do that for images, but not for game repacks.

You often have to pay for networking as well which scales exponentially

Pirates don't build on-prem data centers, they rent servers or services.

Email accounts are usually $10/user/month any time would come from a senior developer ~120+k/year

No, they can re-use whatever server they use for email. Why pay a senior developer ~120+k/year for email?

But they are likely full stack developers so it might be closer to 200k in the US

If a developer works with a pirate, they don't get paid a wage. They're part of the operation, and get paid depending on the donations or nothing at all.

And servers to run development environments (double the costs above!!!)

The development environment can be on the server or even on the dev's laptop. They already paid for that, so $0.

And infrastructure like Jenkins/monitoring which can scale high as well, but likely <$20k/year

Put it on the server. Scalability isn't practical for pirates to begin with. If they lay all eggs in one basket for maximum scalability and cost savings, then the cloud provider can end their entire operation.