Is delivering an image of comparable cost to delivering text via an api?
I have zero experience in this area so could learn something.
Both sites serve - image, video, and text(comments or posts).
Imgur would almost certainly be cheaper to run due to the simpler nature of the site. Imgur would just need checking the overall site for content.
Reddit would be checking each of the subreddits for content and aggerating it. Which would be more complex and more expensive to run.
Realistically, it's the best comparision there is.
> Reddit would be checking each of the subreddits for content and aggerating it. Which would be more complex and more expensive to run.
Did you even take a second to look at Imgur before confidently saying something so incorrect? The homepage clearly references tags, with individual posts a la subreddits.
Also, it's not like each subreddit is an individual database table or something. You're making it seem like aggregation is a substantial cost when it's just a different DB query.
They have tags. Not subreddits. Tagging systems are completely different from how a subreddit works. In my experience a tagging system isn't that expensive to run. Comparing tags with sections seeems completely bonkers and very naive.
> Also, it's not like each subreddit is an individual database table or something. You're making it seem like aggregation is a substantial cost when it's just a different DB query.
In my experience, to make complex data like Reddit's highly available you need to do a whole bunch such as making subreddits separate buckets so to speak. The aggregation almost certainly has a substantial costs. This isn't some dinky MySQL database with few thousand posts.
Pricing for Imgur is: $500 for 7.5m requests then $0.01 per request after that. Then $10,000 for 150m requests and $0.01 per request after that.
Reddit is at $0.24 per 1,000. Or $0.00024 per request.
Imgur is cheaper for 150m requests but Reddit is cheaper for 500m requests.
So really, what is a reasonable pricing?