The post said 450 million pageviews, likely since November. If we make very generous assumptions and assume that each pageview is a megabyte (very generous based on my own experience scanning billions of websites), then that's 450TB total in traffic. If you really did 450TB per month in traffic, you would need slightly more than one gigabit line (and hence VPS), but not more than two. With Hetzner the traffic would cost you €450 or $535.

Did I get something wrong?

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SahAssar 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Well, https://jmail.world/jacebook-logo.png is 670KB by itself and loaded on initial load, so I think they might have blown your suggested traffic budget and still have some optimization to do.

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AceJohnny2 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

How is that image 670 KB!? Definitely some optimization low-hanging fruit there.

Edit: dang, even pngcrush can't get it below 580 KB. Disappointing performance on PNG's part.

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the_fall 25 minutes ago | parent [-]

Because inexplicably, there's random pixel-level noise baked into the blue area. You can't see it unless you crank up contrast, but it makes the bitmap hard to compress losslessly. If you remove it using threshold blur, it doesn't change the appearance at all, but the size is down to 100 kB. Scale it down to a more reasonable size and you're down to 50 kB.

Modern web development never ceases to amaze me.

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SahAssar 14 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

None of this is due to "modern web development". It's just about a dev not checking reasonable asset size before deploying/compiling, that has happened in web, game-dev, desktop apps, server containers, etc. etc.

This should be an SVG (a few kb after proper compression) or if properly made as a PNG it'd probably be in 20-ish kb.

	▲	Mordisquitos 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The dev not having the common sense to check file size and apparently not realising that the PNG format was being grossly misused for this purpose (by not even having a single tone of white for the J and the corners, let alone for the blue background) is modern web development.

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car 17 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Make it an SVG and it's down to 1kb.

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heipei 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Fair enough, I just loaded some pages and some of them are even bigger than 2MB. But then again those static resources would be cached client-side. So unless you have 450 million unique visitors who only ever go to one URL on your site, you are looking at significantly less per pageview. I reloaded the frontpage with caching enabled and it was ~ 30kB of data transfer.

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lexh 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Isn’t part of Vercel’s value proposition a robust global CDN in front? Seems quite a bit different than one sweaty VM in Helsinki.

	▲	__jonas 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Genuine question: How is that a value proposition when Cloudflare offers a CDN for free with unlimited bandwidth, that you could just put in front of the sweaty VM in Helsinki? Not trying to be obtuse, I really don't get how other providers can compete with that, I can't imagine Vercel's CDN is so significantly superior to make it worth it.
	▲	heipei 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yes, and I didn't mean to imply that a single VPS is all you needed. But I wanted to put things into perspective for the other posters who claimed that you couldn't possibly serve a site like this from a single machine, purely in terms of performance.

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sleepybrett 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

well each view of an 'epstien file' is a pdf with images embeded so i think your 1mb might be not so generous.