this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2026
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No, the bigger story is the theft of the stories. Something like this could have been done with any off the shelf CMS, like WordPress.
A03 is an open source platform, you could host an almost perfect clone
true... oh wait, is the code on github or some other VCS? 😄
https://github.com/otwcode/otwarchive
despite this, the thief decided to roll out their own, AI coded clone? Pathetic search skills!
And it’s clear they have like no infra knowledge. They’re talking about how expensive it is. I’m almost sure they spun up a vercel app because they have no idea what they’re doing and the model is just running patterns. The intelligent thing to do to meet the need for what is almost 100% static content, would have been to get a hetzner dedicated box which gives you unlimited traffic at 1gbps, then pay for cloudflare pro and institute hard long running caching rules, then the vast majority of the server bandwidth and requests come off of the box and hit cloudflare’s edge, which generally allows for unlimited caching.
Or, y’know don’t build this at all since it’s stealing user work. But vibecoders with no engineering experience don’t think that way, they’re all grifters
Damn. Don’t give away the blueprint!
Hetzner you say? Not digitalocean (I know, the Omarchy link) or Vultr?
Cloudflare edge is a fine use of this, though even basic nginx level caching can handle this. Heck, if it’s vercel they can still use some caching in front of it to cool off the use.
But… most coders rarely have infra knowledge, let alone hit-and-run vibe coders, who have neither.
The issue with any cloud/vps provider is they usually have a max monthly bandwidth. Hetzner dedicated (not cloud) usually gives you unlimited (reasonable) bandwidth at 1Gbps
And yeah the point of the cache is less about the burn on the box of the request but more the capped bandwidth at the machine level, whereas content being served from the cdn can scale to a shit ton of users and only comes from your box once within the cache expiry time
Yeah but isn’t the max monthly something absurd? Like 1 TB? I know it’s probably not scalable, but this person is just shitting money anyway at this point, so that would be better. No?
Yeah just reading the vibecoders apology notes they posted as part of my recco:
So if they’re blowing a TB or more a day they’d pay out the ass for raw bandwidth at per MB rates past the initial 1TB from cloud providers, and a single box would have trouble keeping up. Cloudflare doesn’t bill separately for bandwidth, and since hetzner gives you unlimited for dedicated, it would have room to seed the cloudflare cache and then cloudflare could serve 100s of TB of bandwidth per month.
All in all if set up correctly you could go with a hetzner ax41, and cloudflare businees, for a total cost of ~$270 per month
“Terabytes”??
Oof. Someone miscalculated what they were getting out of this venture!
lol yes, it’s also a 17 year old kid from India, as stated there, so while I can’t blame the kid for faults in his infra, I can blame him for thinking that scraping people’s work and putting it online without their permission and a monetization vector was a bad idea. That being said, it seems like he did the right thing, apologized, took it down, and I hope he carries the lesson forward to consider the human impact in what he does going forward
I bet he’s gonna get an offer from some scummy company like Byju soon.
Good on him for taking it down. Good lesson learned. Hope it didn’t drown him in debt!
Not surprising, it's been proven that AI use destroys people's research skills.