Aussie living in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Coding since 1998.
.NET Foundation member. C# fan
https://d.sb/
Mastodon: @dan@d.sb

  • 6 Posts
  • 1.48K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • $18/month would be a good deal if they still had all the content they used to have, but they’ve been removing content in favour of their own shows for a long time now. It sucks. You used to be able to find practically anything on Netflix, and if they didn’t have it available for streaming, they’d lend you a DVD (included in the subscription price).

    That and the $18/month tier only goes up to 1080p. In 2025, you still need to pay more for 4k content?? It used to be 720p though, so I guess it’s not all bad.



  • Yeah it’s part of their overall strategy to be seen as a core part of the internet / the web. Same as Yahoo in the 90s and early 2000s.

    The more people that use their free services, the more appealing they are to advertisers compared to competing ad platforms (broader reach), and the more paid subscribers they get.

    Products like Visual Studio, some Jetbrains IDEs, VMware ESXi, and a lot of SaaS products, are (or used to be) free for individuals or for open source usage for a similar reason - people get familiar with them at home, and end up recommending them and buying them at work. A few individuals liking the product can result in large companies signing paid contracts for tens of thousands of users.


  • People don’t realise how much the storage and bandwidth costs are for a site as big as YouTube, and it keeps going up due to the huge number of videos being uploaded. People think that Google are making huge amounts of money from YouTube. In reality, they’re not breaking even and rely on other, profitable business units (like their Workspace and cloud services) to subsidize it.

    There’s no way the ads fully cover the cost, and more and more people are blocking ads. Advertisers don’t pay for blocked ads, and YouTubers don’t make any ad money from your views if you use an ad blocker. (this is the main reason YouTubers say they make less money from ads than they used to - ad blockers)


  • Oh yeah, I had one of those a long time ago for my PayPal account, before smartphones were widespread.

    I’m using a Yubikey with my password manager (self-hosted Vaultwarden) and it works well! The Yubikey is a USB device - you can get it either as a USB-C or USB-A. It should work with any desktop PC as long as USB devices are allowed. I’ve got one on my keychain, and a second one stored somewhere safe. Good to have a spare one as a backup just in case the main one dies.








  • As others have mentioned, VPSes (and rented dedicated servers) count as self-hosted. In many situations, a VPS can make more sense than a home server:

    • Better internet connection - a lot of hosts have 40Gbps connections now, and it’s a data center grade connection with a lower contention ratio.
    • Cheaper upfront - no initial purchase cost.
    • Depending on electricity prices, it can be cheaper over the long run too, especially with a $20-40/year one (see LowEndTalk, GreenCloudVPS Budget KVM, RackNerd specials, etc). That’s the case for me in California - just the electricity for my home server costs more than some of my VPSes.
    • Usually better hardware than you’d have at home - often AMD EPYC or modern Xeons (not a 10 year old E3 or E5), enterprise NVMe SSDs, etc.

  • AWS is very expensive compared to regular VPS services, and you only really get a benefit from it if you use a lot of different AWS services in a multiple regions. One EC2 instance in one region doesn’t really have advantages over a regular VPS.

    If you do want to use AWS, consider using Lightsail. It’s like a regular VPS and has a fixed monthly price for some amount of disk space, CPU, and monthly transfer, father than being dynamically priced.