Maybe its a lot of money just for the web servers, but for the entire infrastructure stack its pretty reasonable IMHO.

There is more to it that http request response. Mangadex also need to store a lot of images and distribute them.

CDNs have already solved this problem and are much cheaper than $1500/month.

I've ran far more complex sites with much higher traffic for less.

Mangadex can't use cloudflare because of privacy reasons. They may be facing similar issues with other popular CDNs.

I am sure they must be using some kind of CDN for sure, however, those options are unlikely to be free

Privacy reasons? It's all static content that is publicly accessible. I don't understand what the privacy reasons could be under this context.

Are they worried about CDNs logging the images their visitors access? Seems like an absurd edge case to worry about in my opinion.

> however, those options are unlikely to be free

I wasn't even talking about free CDNs :)

They’re basically hosting illegal content, or at least a good chunk of it is copyright-infringing so they cannot use cloudflare or any of the other off the shelf offerings

Not disputing your statement, just made me laugh a bit because almost every single site I visit recently that offers links to copyrighted content [stored in file lockers] sits behind Cloudflare

I wouldn’t say illegal content, since most of that gets removed relatively quickly. But definitely a lot of content in the grey zones of copyright law.

Hm? There are lots of copyright-infringing sites using Cloudflare, and Cloudflare seems pretty content to generally ignore infringement notices.

I see. That does complicate things somewhat.

I wonder if there's merit in them approaching studios with a proper business plan?

Now with the way the manga, Manghwa, and WEBTOON industry is tied up. But I believe that is their end goal eventually.

I think privacy as in the mangadex team don't want to get sued. So they avoid popular services who are more willingly share their identity.

Then you should read the article ;)