Gnarly-Repacks is requesting donations for the renewal bill for their site and I know FitGirl sporadically makes requests for donations as well. It makes me curious what range of expenses do sites like these incur and what they are.
I do vaguely recall The Pirate Bay 2013 documentary TPB AFK talking a bit about their revenue but I don’t know if they talked much about their expenses.
If it has a lot of users but no downloads probably runs on a $50-$100 dedi server
If it has no users and no downloads probably a $5 VPS
If it has downloads then a lot
Having the free time to do the repacking costs more
what if the downloads are just torrent files? i mean, they’re at least small files
Hard if not impossible to say. It depends on what they host. Hosting also gets real expensive if they make poor choices.
If they choose to host their WordPress piracy website on WordPress.com, then that’s a shit idea. They’re overpriced as hell, even with an annual discount. 300 € annually is WordPress.com’s discounted price for a somewhat usable, but still restricted WordPress instance. Furthermore, pirates face the risk that hosting providers terminate their account and keep the money, so long billing periods are risky.
They accept that risk to save some cash, and use WordPress.com. Okay, now what? WordPress.com terminates the account at the start of the new billing period and keeps the money. How sweet. Pay 300 € for the privilege of another restricted WordPress instance. Annual spending: 600 € for what could’ve been 21.12 € annually with a dumb simple Hetzner webspace.
You may think that this is impossible, nobody is dumb enough to spend 600 € when a 21.12 € solution is good enough, right? Look no further than any company that lifts and shifts apps into the cloud that weren’t designed to run in the cloud. Expensive as hell for no fucking reason other than it’s in the cloud now. Or this poor fella who got a $ 30 gift card for saving their employer $ 500,000 with five clicks.
One thing to consider is that it’s not just hosting a site, it’s all the work they do to do the DRM removal and the repack. That takes time, which might be time they could be using to earn money. So getting some money from their work can help incentivize it.
Hard to say what that actually boils down to for each person, if they’re not releasing any expenses info (site costs, time spent per project, etc). If you’re thinking about donating, I’d think of it more as a “thank you” gift for their work than anything else, and give an amount you wouldn’t miss.
