How much does it cost to run a site that deals with pirated content?

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If it has a lot of users but no downloads probably runs on a $50-$100 dedi server

If it has no users and no downloads probably a $5 VPS

If it has downloads then a lot

One thing to consider is that it's not just hosting a site, it's all the work they do to do the DRM removal and the repack. That takes time, which might be time they could be using to earn money. So getting some money from their work can help incentivize it.

Hard to say what that actually boils down to for each person, if they're not releasing any expenses info (site costs, time spent per project, etc). If you're thinking about donating, I'd think of it more as a "thank you" gift for their work than anything else, and give an amount you wouldn't miss.

Now, I'm not talking about exactly the same thing here. And I don't actually run any sites at this point in my life.

That being said, I considered setting up a site to host my stuff. Mostly writing, some art, just a kind of vanity project that would let me distribute files to friends and family with an easy link instead of having to send them files when requested.

So, I could have used any hosting service since it's all legal files. I own all the copy rights, and that means the price starts out pretty low. I never looked into what the less stringent services would cost.

But, it worked out that it would cost me about 300 a year between domain name, file hosting, and ssl certificate, etc at the cheapest rates I could find.

Which is why I didn't do it, lol. It's way cheaper to just deal with the hassles of sending files via telegram or whatever. That only costs time.

I've a friend that runs a site for their business though. He's shelling out about a grand a year, and doesn't host any files for download. That's with some fancy templates, and some kind of security thing that I've never asked about the specifics of. He was a bit surprised how much it cost.

So I suspect that if someone wanted to actually host a large amount of files like movies, games, and music would need, they'd be looking at that range as a minimum cost. The storage space is fairly expensive once you're into terabytes, or so I was told.

But I don't think the repack folks do it that way. They use torrents, which means things are cheaper. So the costs of that are probably closer to the bottom end of the scale where I would have been

Again, this is not the same thing, and I'm guesstimating off of research I did years ago, so don't take it as some kind of expert talking.

It depends on a lot of things. Something self-hosted would just cost the power and Internet you are already paying for but if you're renting the hosting and maybe even get development for your site it could cost a ton.

As others have mentioned it really depends on a lot of factors.
Domain name ~$15/year Offshore server providers usually start around $30/server/month and quickly raise to thousands. Corporate application techs are usually $2k-200k/month depending on size. Anything that requires a GPU would be a custom build, dell power edge is a powerful machine you can lookup retail for. Storage Amazon s3 is $0.022 per GB/month. Keep in mind that providers usually have redundant copies in case of failure and often provide multiple releases codexes, resolutions and providing a lot more than people are requesting You often have to pay for networking as well which scales exponentially. Email accounts are usually $10/user/month any time would come from a senior developer ~120+k/year. But they are likely full stack developers so it might be closer to 200k in the US. You also need all the supporting licenses $0 in this case And servers to run development environments (double the costs above!!!) And infrastructure like Jenkins/monitoring which can scale high as well, but likely <$20k/year

Edit:The prices I quoted are for real businesses, and businesses usually negotiate rates and have discounts to close deals. This is the price for running a technical service, the fact you are disputing $5/year means you have no intent on having a real conversation about hosting fees. This is to ballpark a price for op. Stop being pedantic

It depends on a lot of factors.

Person spending days and weeks to make content, repacks it and makes it available for free.

Person downloading and using it for free: why are you asking for money?

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Anyone can spin up a website for cheap and serve torrents for the heavy lifting. At least when you know people will seed your stuff, which is the case it seems.

Maybe the website takes a big load, IDK, but did you consider that asking for funds for the site isn't (only) for paying the hoster? It's for paying for the site, for supper, pc parts and the games, work, among others. Seems to be quite exclusive work too.

I'm not trying to do a moral judgement here, just trying to clear up the confusion.