Personal site with ads, seriously?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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
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. :(
> 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...
It's possible that their ads don't actually do any tracking, in which case they're receiving collateral damage. They seem technical enough, they should be able to figure out why the tracker blockers are blocking their ads and get things fixed (either in the ad code or in the upstream tracker blocker software).