Static hosting is essentially free. Add ads and it's a cash machine, not the opposite. Either there's something that they didn't tell us or they're incompetent.
The only thing needed is a staticization of their website, which any CMS they had could very easily be set up to do. Look at the archives of NYT, they're barebone pages that preserve the content without any dynamic areas.
Server load at that scale is measured in single-digit dollars per month, and bandwidth _might_ require two pipes with enough images being loaded. Multiply by 20 for replication and latency issues, and you're still only talking $200/month.
As a ballpark, even bad ad impressions bring in $10/mille, maybe $1/mille for something unintrusive. Does Anandtech get more than 200k impressions per month? If we're talking about a "hundreds of thousands of requests per minute" scale then I would certainly hope so.
It's most definitely free - cloudflare won't even ask you for the business plan (as long as their CDN's are caching properly). I had a site serving 90tb/month on a free plan (99.87% of the traffic was cached).
Simultaneously, the fact that anyone with any supposed business experience gifted that priceless level of ranking would decide to shut down the business is insane.
Like, the fact that someone is making money off of MySpace.com right now and Anandtech couldn’t swing it makes zero logical sense. To me it feels like they tried nothing and were all out of ideas.
Any time private equity does something stupid or short-sighted, remember this:
Private equity firms - or, at least, the ones that people complain about - don't own their own capital. They have to rent it from somewhere else, and those people get paid first.
The PE firm only really gets paid for their expertise when they make their hurdle. Ergo, PE is incentivized to make terribly short-sighted business decisions, because those are the ones that will bring in the money to make their hurdle. They get caught in a loop of buying and gutting otherwise productive businesses.
This capital structure made sense back when PE was a tiny part of the economy that bought and modernized small businesses, but now PE is more akin to a failing empire; with an entitled aristocratic class that will shiv any leader that tries to change the structure to be more sustainable. They are spending $2000 on candles and the candles have knives.
