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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

I do run a popular blog, and a $5 a month Digital Ocean droplet handles millions of requests per month without breaking a sweat.

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If every user is collecting 36mb a day like in the story here, your droplet wouldn’t even be capable of serving 500 users a month without hitting your bandwidth limit. With their current rates, your one million requests would cost you around 10 million USD.

If OP enabled gzip then this 36mb would be 13mb.

If OP reduced 30 months of posts in rss to 12 months then this 13mb would be 5mb a day.

Using Cloudflare free plan and this static content is cached without any problem.

Yeah, but also... if RSS readers behaved correctly, it would be 512 kb. (170 kb with gzip, if she didn't enable it like you imply – I'm too lazy to check, but I assumed it was on.)

I think making clients behave correctly is much more sustainable solution, although we could do better than doing so at the cost of the end users.

This entire thread is a vivid illustration of why software is so shitty in general these days.

30 * 500 * 36mb = 560gb and I have 1tb a month on my apparently $6 droplet

Correction - from my billing page it's $4.50 a month, from the resize page it is $6 so I'm guessing I am grandfathered in to some older pricing

That's ridiculously big quantity of data to serve a seldomly updated blog just because the client doesn't want (or know how, or think about) to implement an easy and old http method.

Imagine the petabytes of data transferred through the internet saved if a couple RSS clients added that method.

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