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>The modern Wikipedia has 11-12 times as many page views than it had in 2005,[21] but the WMF is spending 33 times as much to serve up these pages to the readers. This seems reasonable given that they have improved reliability, redundancy and backups.

I dont see how this is reasonable, especially when CPU , RAM and SSD is anywhere between 10 to even 100,000x faster while being cheaper as well. Bandwidth cost has also dropped by 95% or 20x.




Its because despite the hardware gains, cloud storage providers don’t pass those savings to consumers and never cut their prices.


Let's ignore Wiki host their own Server for a moment. Cloud provider DO cut their prices ( not Data transfer ), especially over the span of 10 years. They just do it at a slower pace.

But even accounting for the cloud, AWS in 2017 is still easily 10x better in performance per dollar over 2006.

I haven't even factor in the software improvement. JVM / PHP / C# / Python or Ruby compiler has gotten at least 3x faster over that period.

At one point I even wished Wiki to have saved those money so they could acquire Mozilla and be in the browser space and saving ( or at least participating ) in the Open Web.


OK you have me on compute. Seems like storage however has not budged since the $5tb month pricepoint a few like backblaze have established. More still have cut data plans e.g. enterprise plans clients would be happy to spend a huge amount to not worry about hitting a storage limit, but thats just not offered anymore these days despite prices of drives from the storage cartel dropping at an even pace per year.


Wikimedia manage their own servers. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers




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