One of my sites, Another one, Related to software engineering have 25% of it’s visitors coming from Russia, Which I am very happy about and glad that I have visitors and entries and impressions to my website. It’s a huge big thumbs up for what I do and my work, It’s a good verification that I have returned visitors from Russia and also direct visitors from Russia (meaning someone saved a link to my site, and visit again the site at later stage or submit the link to their friends/colleagues etc). Overall I should be very happy about visitors, Russia or not!
The Problem
My site start crushing, slowing down, my CPU and GPU which I manage as my own Devops engineer ends with my private servers crushing which cause me problems and downtime and hurts my SEO and my non-russian visitors. And no, My site (although is a good target for DDoS attacks for some reasons) is not under any cyber attack or DDoS attack or any other malicious cyber attack.
The simple volume of the traffic results with my servers reaching to it’s maximum capacity and often crush and restarts. Now wait a minute, That’s a rich-people problems no? just increase the size of your servers, spend more money and you’ll be fine.
Increasing my servers will cost me more money, The real issue here that the traffic coming from certain countries, In my case Russia, doesn’t yield any revenue – but it cost me money to maintain and support. So essentially whats happen is that I subsidize free services, education and content for a large portion of traffic in which I don’t recevie any income from. It has high cost and ZERO return (ads don’t run for Russian visitors, any it’s next to impossible to charge a Russia citizen with any monthly subscription base solutions).
Summary (TLDR)
Russia Visitors cost me money to serve, I can’t make any money from visitors and traffic coming from Russia (due to politics and other reasoning) I end up subsidize an expensive service/content to a large part of my audience (25%!) – what should I do?
Haven’t decided yet what to do with the sinkhole.
Lior Amsalem embarked on his software engineering journey in the early 2000s, Diving into Pascal with a keen interest in creating, developing, and working on new technologies. Transitioning from his early teenage years as a freelancer, Lior dedicated countless hours to expanding his knowledge within the software engineering domain. He immersed himself in learning new development languages and technologies such as JavaScript, React, backend, frontend, devops, nextjs, nodejs, mongodb, mysql and all together end to end development, while also gaining insights into business development and idea implementation.
Through his blog, Lior aims to share his interests and entrepreneurial journey, driven by a desire for independence and freedom from traditional 9-5 work constraints.
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