MangaDex infrastructure overview
I run an Alexa top-2000 website.  (Mangadex is presently at about 6000.)  I spend less than $250 a month.<p>I have loads and loads of thoughts about what they could be doing differently to reduce their costs but I&#x27;ll just say that the number one thing Mangadex could be doing right now from a cursory glance is to reduce the number of requests.  A fresh load of the home page generates over 100 requests.  (Mostly images, then javascript fragments.)  Mangadex apparently gets over 100 million requests per day.  My site - despite ostensibly having more traffic - gets fewer than half that many in a month.  (And yes, it&#x27;s image-heavy.)<p>A couple easy wins would be to reduce the number of images loaded on the front page.  (Does the &quot;Seasonal&quot; slider really need 30 images, or would 5 and a link to the &quot;seasonal&quot; page be enough?  Same thing with &quot;Recently Added&quot; and the numbers of images on pages in general.)  The biggest win would probably be reducing the number of javascript requests.  Somehow people seem to think there&#x27;s some merit to loading javascript which subsequently loads additional javascript.  This adds a tremendous amount of latency to your page load and generates needless network traffic.  Each request has a tremendous amount of overhead - particularly for dynamically-generated javascript.  It&#x27;s much better to load all of the javascript you need in a single request or a small handful of requests.  Unfortunately, this is probably a huge lift for a site already designed in this way, but the improved loading time would be a big UX win.<p>Anyway - best of luck to MangaDex!  They&#x27;ve clearly put a lot of thought into this.