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.
300 euros annually is not horribly overpriced for what wordpress provides.
50 gigs of storage, “unlimited visitors and bandwidth” and five nines uptime costs money. Those all cost money and having the staff on call to maintain it is very much worth the price. I haven’t priced anything out recently, but 300 euros a year seems “reasonable” for the convenience aspects.
That said, if you don’t need the five nines of uptime you can get away with dropping a lot of that. I tend to not check the actual group sites all that often, but a quick check of Fitgirl’s site looks like it is blogs and links. Probably gets hit with a LOT of DDOSes and attacks on the regular but not much bandwidth needs.
Because people will very often vastly overpay for what they need. But this seems “reasonable” for what it is and, if you need it, having one check to write a month/year is likely worth whatever overhead wordpress throws on top (which, considering the feature set, probably isn’t all that much).
But yeah, you hit the nail on the head with hosting sites likely to drop piracy sites.
I didn’t know that. Yeah, that sounds reasonable if they need it. It’s probably best to view my original comment from the perspective that they don’t need these benefits.