this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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How much does it cost to run a site that deals with pirated content? (leminal.space)
submitted 11 months ago by CorrodedCranium@leminal.space to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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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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[–] lukas@lemmy.haigner.me 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 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.