Cost of serving billions of images per month
The numbers being thrown around on this post are staggering. Not the bandwidth, storage or or the number of images —they're all pretty average for a small image host— but the casual tone that they're willing to throw money at services rather than engineering some quite simple problems.<p>Seriously, I <i>know</i> I'm not in their shoes but I know what they do, I know popular options in these areas and I know they are literally throwing cash away by not trying to in-house any of this.<p>The worst thing is they seem <i>proud</i> about their decisions; that their current situation has justified $100K/month expenses. I'm not the only person in here that thinks they could be delivering the same —even better— service on a fraction of their current budget, even after hiring. I think they should be ashamed.