It used to cost a heck of a lot of money to host a website. At one point I was responsible for sendmail.org, which was a pretty popular site for the time (2000/2001). Especially when we had a new release and got "slashdotted".

To build a site that could stand up to that kind of traffic, we had to pay Dell $10,000 for a beefy enough box, and then host that 5U monster in a cabinet in a datacenter. That kind of datacenter space cost about $500/mo.

So accounting for inflation, that was about $700/mo for the datacenter space (assuming I had use of the remaining 37U that I was paying for), as well as an initial investment in hardware of about $15,000 in today's dollars.

This was a static website.

To run that same site today to handle an equivalent burst of traffic, I could run it on AWS for about $15/mo and have much better reliability, or on a $5/mo VPS and have the same reliability as I had in 2001.

All with no upfront investment nor the need to rent a bunch of cabinet space I may or may not use.

It cost the same, but in different areas.

In 2001, you were probably one of few sites per subject matter, hence your traffic was free, but the tech was expensive.

Today there are 1000's of sites per subject matter. Hence the tech is free but the traffic is expensive.

Today, you can get GitHub (or a similar service) to pay for your hosting and have it for free.

Only up to a certain limit though.

What's the limit?

> the modern web is expensive to host

these days, the hosting costs of an "internet of yore" site is literally only a couple bucks a month on a vhost provider. In the good old days it was really expensive.

If you don't need SSL it's almost free via places like GitHub.

And you can still do SSL on github.

Maybe don’t shit up your website with a bunch of the modern “necessities” and it’ll be cheaper to host.

You probably meant: "because the modern web, where 1/10 is the actual content and the other 9/10 is junk, is expensive to host".

If that's the case, then the above line identifies both the problem and the solution.

It's literally free to host mostly static sites these days. Just put free Cloudflare in front of free App Engine or other free host. Unlimited traffic, $0.

So you are saying the present system is just great, and no efforts should be made to come up with a better one?

except precious little is allocated to the content providers: tighty wighty's or boxer briefs or thongs or whateva...

nor is hosting a significant cost.

what is different is that we re-invented a lousier wheel.

IRC. who did threaded messaging better? oh we better pay slack if we want more than 10k messages archived lol.