They wanted to host all the videos and images years ago, probably in anticipation of eventually ipo-ing so they could have control of the content? Not really sure why.
Possibly because imgur was building its own social network around the media people were uploading for posting reddit? You’d see a pic on reddit but if you clicked beyond the xownde doer view you’d see comments from imgur itself.
Presumably the volume of traffic their servers need to handle?
One database call is pretty lightweight, but millions a second add up to some serious processing. Which, presumably, needs a lot of servers.
Stackoverflow and Hackernews have very low hosting costs. Reddit is serving text, which is incredibly cheap.
Sure, but are they handling the volume of traffic that Reddit does (or did until yesterday)?
Stackoverflow, probably not. Stack Exchange, possibly
They wanted to host all the videos and images years ago, probably in anticipation of eventually ipo-ing so they could have control of the content? Not really sure why.
Possibly because imgur was building its own social network around the media people were uploading for posting reddit? You’d see a pic on reddit but if you clicked beyond the xownde doer view you’d see comments from imgur itself.