[heipei]

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?

[SahAssar]

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.

[AceJohnny2]

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.

[heipei]

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.

[direwolf20]

For high traffic check places like datapacket (no affiliation), or slightly cheaper, places like onlyservers (no paid affiliation, was a customer) or even find a transit provider and a colo and a server yourself. For $535 a month or less you can get a pretty good amount of bandwidth.

[lexh]

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]

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]

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.

[alex_sf]

That's not worth 45k. It's barely worth anything for a typical website, tbh.

[sleepybrett]

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