This really stopped being true, before Ben's announcement. And had not been true for quite some time. The CBA just no longer made sense.
Still though.. if the site has close-to-zero visitors the cost of keeping it up should be minuscule and would serve as a "live prop" for Ben's CV. On the surface of it (which is what I see and why I ask), keeping a site like this up even with a few thousand page hits an hour ought to be technically trivial.
I was just curious about the usage statistics, really. The whole thing strikes me as about as logical as throwing away something old "just because", despite it's sentimental value.
I mean, it's not like the Internet needs another cool domain forever lost to some random Asian "blog" with all of three posts, all dating from 2012, and no contact info.
The "something old...<with> sentimental value" is doing more than just taking up space in Ben's attic. It's costing him time and money, and to whatever degree/in whatever amount that's true, I trust him to decide when it isn't worth it any more. I'm sure he has plenty of more professional work on his CV demonstrating his skills
There's no need to come to his defense, oh Nights-of-RAFO, nor is stating the obvious a good defense if one was actually needed.
I'm simply curious about the costs and the statistics that drive them. Maybe I'd like to buy a premium membership or some merch? Perhaps offer to assist with development and hosting, free of charge? Maybe I won't if it turns out the costs of running this page is 20 times higher than they technically should be (old code, old versions of software, etc).
This page I'm currently on takes ~223kB of network bandwidth on the initial load, and ~55kB on subsequent requests. With some optimization (concatting and minifying, making sprite-sheets for the graphics, etc.) I'm guessing that this could be reduced to less than 50kB average.
The lowest-tier "droplet" on digitalocean.com should be beefy enough to host this page, and the 1TB data transfer limit would allow roughly 21.475.000 page views per month. That's 16 per second, average, around-the-clock. All this for a whopping $5 monthly.
See why I'm asking? To the best of my knowledge, it's not like Ben lives in some backwater country where $5 is a lot. Nor is he a single mom of 4 struggling to make ends meet.
Given the set of assumptions I'm allowing (since I am yet to get an answer from the Man himself), it seems.. uncouth to simply dump two decent domain names on the festering landfill which is the Internet, from whence there is no return, to save oneself the cost of a pint each month.