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.
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.