[gw98]

The person is a salaried employee. They are getting paid by their employer. The web site is a personal portfolio / blog /resume site. Traditionally you're paid in attention on that sort of thing and use it to bolster salary via opportunities.

Getting a few dollars here and there from a personal site's ads feels cheap and detracts from the article. Tip jar, fine. But ads no. It just feels dirty. Even if they are "ethical".

From my perspective (as an employer) I see this stuff and think holy hell they'll want to stick advertising on everything. Turns me right off.

[xena]

Author here. I'm sorry you feel this way. The ads are an experiment to see how much money I'm leaving on the table by not doing them. As of late it is currently just enough to pay for half of my server costs per month. This combined with Patreon means that my blog is cashflow positive. It's nowhere near enough to make a living off of, but it helps me get a small passive income and pays for all of my video games.

From your perspective as an employer, this should signal that I know what I'm worth and I am more than willing to negotiate for it. If you want the ads gone, please feel free to email me a job opportunity. I'll be more than willing to seriously consider it should you meet my requirements.

[isoprophlex]

I'm seriously not trolling you, please take this as a question in good faith if you can... (I understand that any message prefaced as such is immediately suspect)

How much does it cost to host that website? It can't be much more than 10-15 usd/month, right? If so, is it really worth it to recover such relatively small amounts through serving ads?

Maybe I'm wildly off in my estimation; personally I see adding ads as a pretty heavy thing to do, so the monetary benefits would have to clearly outweigh that...

[xena]

My website is hosted off a Hetzner dedicated server (Ryzen 5 3600, 64 GB of ram) in Helsinki. That costs about 70 EUR per month (though I use it for other things like my IRC bouncer, been considering moving that to my homelab, and innumerable side projects I've picked up and abandoned over the years) and also stores all of my random files I've accumulated over the years. It's on another continent so I have an easy to access live backup of some very important files in case my house gets destroyed.

The other expensive parts are AWS Route 53 for DNS after I dropped Cloudflare (cost varies based on popularity, but ranges between USD$7.50 and USD$12.50, this is still cheaper than Cloudflare because I paid them USD$20 per month) and the CDN I host on fly.io which costs about USD$5-7 per month including bandwidth overages.

My website gets more traffic than you are probably comfortable with imagining. I have to take performance and hardware efficiency seriously. I can easily do a few hundred gigabytes per month of egress bandwidth. More if I end up posting bangers. This is after doing things like hilariously optimizing images (the stickers can get down to about 10 KB each with avid files) and literally having my site load everything into ram on application boot.

I am told that these performance requirements are not needed for most websites, but I don't seem to be lucky enough to be able to do things the stupid way. I have to actually think about the performance impacts of everything I do because getting on the front page of Hacker News so often means that I need to focus on making things super efficient.

For a while my tower was also a Risen 5 3600, so I was doing the moral equivalent of compiling my website with -march=native to unlock _even more performance gains_, but now the machine I deploy from is a homelab node with an Intel Core i5 10600 so I can't do that trick anymore.

Subscribing to me on Patreon gives me infinitely more money than ads ever will, but having multiple income streams means that there's redundancy.

Of course I can afford to pay all of this out of pocket, but everything paying for itself is super fucking nice.

[isoprophlex]

Whoa, okay, that's

A) a very beefy machine and a lot of traffic,

B) a very detailed, thoughtful reply so thanks a lot for taking the time and

C) a wonderful explanation why your site loads so amazingly fast

[xena]

The actual site binary ends up using about 256 MB of ram worst case, the main problem is that in order to get more cores on Hetzner, you need to pay for more ram. I run some virtual machines on that dedi but they don't really add up to much in the RAM/active CPU cores department.

I go into much more detail about this on my blog here:

- https://xeiaso.net/talks/how-my-website-works

- https://xeiaso.net/blog/xedn

- https://xeiaso.net/blog/site-update-mastodon-quoting

And pretty much in any post labeled "Site Update". My site is kind of hilariously complicated because it has to be. :(

[cactacea]

> My website is hosted off a Hetzner dedicated server

> also stores all of my random files I've accumulated over the years

> live backup of some very important files in case my house gets destroyed.

You should seriously consider moving your backups off your web server...

[xena]

Those files are backed up other safe places as added redundancy. Those files aren't visible from the public_html folder of my website. Please have faith that I know what I'm doing.

[ilyt]

How dare they monetize their time outside of work! You're supposed to work for someone so they can sell your work for more and keep the difference!