[Macha]

> Computational resources and bandwidth have become massively less expensive over those 20 years.

Your budget tier VPS provider on the other hand has only really doubled what you get over the last 10 years, and user feature expectations and AI scrapers really have caused resource usage to more than double.

The cost efficiency has really only benefited the middle end here really. HN is probably cheaper to run than it was 10 years ago. But the large sites are on cloud providers who have provided added services that you might not have used 10 years ago to keep up their margins, and the intro tier VPS that "Bob's Friendly phpBB Forum" might be on isn't getting you much more, which matters when Bob's revenue is $60/year from a handful of the most investigated regulars only.