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yuvadam
Funny. I was just asking myself this exact question an hour ago.
martinkallstrom
So the cost of people thinking about the ascii art is clearly much higher than the bandwidth consumed in transferring it. At least when factoring in gzip.
oconnore
It's probably worth $119 to demonstrate to potential hires the pride they take in their code. Unless a site is post-processing their code like Google does, I would expect it to be beautiful.
myusuf3
that very well maybe true!
aes
And the publicity caused by this post is already worth it.
brlewis
What's the cost after gzip encoding?
keltex
The page is 5 KB compressed and 26 KB uncompressed. So the real cost is around $22/month assuming all clients use gzip.
keefe
and assuming this giant site hasn't worked out some better deal for bandwidth AND hasn't worked out a solid caching strategy
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monk-e-boy
Come on, we're coders/hackers I think it's important to have something neat and beautiful hidden in plain sight like that.

This sort of 'cool thing' should be encouraged. How boring would life be without some people out there having a little fun?

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maratd
Using a proper CDN ( http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/cloud_hosting_products/files/... ) you'll pay 0.18 USD per gigabyte. And that's the retail rate for a nobody. If you're somebody, you get discounts. Plus gzip and all the other stuff people brought up. Your real cost is like 10 bucks for that logo per month. I still wouldn't do it, but I'm a cheap bastard. Also, they're pissing away a lot more money with all that whitespace in the html/css/javascript!
jonursenbach
Their homepage isn't static content so it can't really be served from a CDN.
maratd
This is true, but it doesn't change anything. The cost for bandwidth is the same (at least from Rackspace) regardless of what you have going on in the background.
Tichy
What is the cost in lost rankings on Google? They do seem to consider loading speed in their rankings.
myusuf3
thats true; good catch! but people tend to wave that one away as long as it isn't horribly slow. Something to consider for sure!
necro
Difference of the art unzipped maybe 500 bytes but the difference gzipped is only 150 bytes.

Also this argument of comparing home internet bandwidth overage is only valid if you are serving a site like this from your home :) If you think you're going to get impacted by this overage because of your surfing habits, you'd have to surf...

1GB/150= 6 666 666 pages in the month

since there are 2 592 000 seconds in a month, you're looking at 2.5 page loads per second. You're probably not there.

Also the main page load is 1.5M (including all the resources) so the 150 bytes is even less of a burden.

I think you'd be better off looking at optimizing/saving money somewhere else ;)

myusuf3
It was just a commentary; you are completely correct. Just an observation. :)
s3graham
Heh, how about the size of posting a png of ascii art? ;)
myusuf3
haha its a tumblr blog; I dont pay the bandwidth bill :)
CoffeeDregs
Off-topic, but: I'm surprised that extra GBs are that inexpensive in Canada... A GB transferred on Amazon is $0.10-$0.15, so consumer transfers are 3-5x more. That's not so bad is it? I've got a teeny little cable pipe (25Mb/s) coming into my house and Amazon's got a firehose; is 3-5x unreasonable?
fmavituna
In my book $119 well spent (also gzip+caching etc., it's possibly much less in reality)
andrenotgiant
I'll tell you what's wasting bandwidth on Tumblr: Inline CSS -- Every Tumblr page contains at least a kb of CSS in the HEAD section. This CSS is downloaded again for every pageload.

Not to mention that many of the tumblogs use the same theme (same CSS)

aliukani
I've always questioned wether inline CSS is the best way to go, given Tumblr's downtime issues.
andrewvc
As if tumblr's paying $0.50 / GB for bandwidth.

I'd be surprised if they're paying anywhere near that, prolly more like $0.04GB.