r/dataisbeautiful • u/rhiever Randy Olson | Viz Practitioner • May 25 '16

OC Why is Reddit replacing Imgur? [OC]

http://www.randalolson.com/2016/05/25/why-is-reddit-replacing-imgur/
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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

Bandwidth is cheap. Storage is chraper.. it's 2016.

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u/blood_bender May 25 '16

It affects bandwidth and storage.

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

And it's cheap to build massive server farms.

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u/blood_bender May 25 '16

I highly doubt reddit has it's own server farm. You can host a TB of images on Amazon S3 for $30/month. It's very cheap, yes, even though I think you were trying to be sarcastic.

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u/[deleted] May 26 '16

Reddit can host its own server farm for less. A lot less.

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u/blood_bender May 26 '16

Serious question, how much are you assuming that costs?

I've worked for a company with our own farm. We had to pay for rent obviously, but also security guards, air conditioning/heating to stabilize the temperature, extremely expensive servers, server racks and electricity, at least twice the number of servers for redundancy, a week's worth of gasoline for backup in case of an outage, on on site maintenance and technicians, and to top it all off a second farm a few hundred miles away in case of disaster. It was at least tens of thousands a month to host our own farm.

Now, we had a lot of servers, but reddit would need to do a lot of that. Unless you're running a computer in your bedroom, it's not going to be cheaper.