What the hell is going on with their costs?
It started as a student project by Atko, using .Net and MSSQL, some of the SQL they were able to migrate. But once you use MS, you pay if it goes big. Plus there were allegedly several ddoses. Cloudflare isn't cheap, merch probably doesn't pay for much, there were almost no new ads in the last months, who donates for this quality content,... it adds up.
I know costs are massive, but I'm just wondering why they were saying costs were 5k/month over a year ago, now they're at 6.6k/month with more traffic than before. Yet they should have had big discounts during the time period when it was supposedly 5k.
If they were actually paying 5k/month all this time, the site wouldn't still be up because they don't get much money in donations. I am also guessing they don't have the money themselves to float 5k/month for however many months it has been. If that is indeed the case, what was the real cost, and what happened to the donation money?
Hosting is clearly a huge issue, so I don't understand why concerns weren't seriously raised and actions taken before now if they wanted the site to stay up.
Well this is interesting for a few reasons. This was inevitable, and was probably caused by their inability to somehow monetise the site. They had a ridiculous amount of traffic for a few months and I have no idea why they didn't capitalise on it while they could. There is no way in hell they're going to get any investors now, because the site has such a bad image after the hate sub influxes.
Another thing is I'm not entirely sure what Putt is talking about. Azure - which is a bad idea in my opinion because it costs so much money - apparently gives huge discounts to startups, yet I clearly remember Atko putting the figure of monthly costs at just over 5k a month. That was a year ago or more. So what were they doing with the donation and merch money? They also said they had poured their own money into hosting a few times.
What the hell is going on with their costs?