[ndriscoll]

Yeah? People do that for fun. A $160 minipc is capable of serving 1Gb/s of web traffic without breaking a sweat (limited by far by the NIC, and for most people, their Internet connection). At a 20W TDP even at 20¢/kWh you're looking at ~$3/month to drive it full tilt.

If I'm reading it right, the wikimedia grafana indicates they're usually under 20 Gb/s for reference.

[JumpCrisscross]

I suspect there is substantial overlap between those of us who lament at consumers being unwilling to pay trivial sums for ad-free services and those of us who think people will spend even a hundred dollars on web-connected minipcs.

[ndriscoll]

Consumers do pay for services (c.f. Netflix, Spotify, Steam. All are trivial to pirate but do billions in revenue). Some ad-supported services price dump onto the market, distorting it. Others are actually worthless. In any case, my point was these days computers are so absurdly powerful that the resource cost for a distributed web would be trivial. Even bargain bin low-power computers can handle millions of users.