Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

> If you can save that 2MB per user per cache life, you pay that much less on the internet bill for your hosting

Ah yes - I remember those _dark days_ of being a shared webhosting customer over a decade ago and stressing about breaking my 500GB/mo data transfer limit.

Today, Azure's outbound data costs on the order of $0.08/GB, so 1MB is $0.000078125, so the cost of 2MB of JS is $0.00015625.

Supposing you have one million new visitors every month (i.e. nothing's cached at their end so they'll download the full 2MB) - those one million visitors will cost you $156.25 in data-transfer.

Compare that to the immediate cost to the business of paying their SWEs and SREs to trim down the site's resources to a more realistic few-hundred-KB, supposing that's a good 2-3 week project for 3-4 people - assuming a W/Best Coast company, that's ( $250k / 52 ) * 3 * 4 == $57,000.

From looking at those numbers, there is absolutely no business case in optimizing web content - it's now significantly cheaper (on paper) to have a crappy UX and slow load-times than it is to fix it.



Consider applying for YC's Winter 2026 batch! Applications are open till Nov 10

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: