The infrastructure (hardware and bandwidth) is cheap (almost free) for Q&A. Stackoverflow.com hasn’t even gone to two Web server yet.
Let's count them, shall we? http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/01/stack-overflow-network...
6 web servers and 2 database servers (the load balancers are virtual machined)
And about the money, there are labor costs.
Fog Creek has ~24 employees.
34 - http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2010/02/14.html
And yes the hardware/bandwidth costs are (still) nothing. Read:
http://highscalability.com/blog/2009/8/5/stack-overflow-arch...
(slightly outdated)
and you'll see how cheap the servers are: single CPU, relatively low RAM.
The 24 was a typo (now fixed). I updated the other too. Thanks for pointing that out.
The infrastructure (hardware and bandwidth) is cheap (almost free) for Q&A. Stackoverflow.com hasn’t even gone to two Web server yet.
Let's count them, shall we? http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/01/stack-overflow-network...
6 web servers and 2 database servers (the load balancers are virtual machined)
And about the money, there are labor costs.
Fog Creek has ~24 employees.
34 - http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2010/02/14.html