That’s impressive. I guess much of the processing requirements of corporations is due to the ‘extras’ – all the ads and the data harvesting?

That is, of course, part of it, but most of the reason is the inefficiency of most companies nowadays. These companies will write their programs in languages like Python and JS which can’t take advantage of resources to their full extent, and then instead of optimizing them or rewriting them in another language, they just get more servers because it’s easier.

In fact, if you were to go on something like r/programming and ask for advice about which programming language to switch to because your program is slow, the advice you’ll usually get is “just get more servers”. It’s really inefficient, bad for the environment, and just lazy.

This trend is continuing beyond just hosting. Look at Electron. Essentially, it’s a project that allows people to make a webapp and then pretend it’s a desktop application by bundling a chromium browser and exposing some OS APIs. Essentially, this means when you open an electron “app”, you’re actually opening a browser that is acting as if it was an app. You can imagine how many compute resources are wasted just on running browsers. Examples of such apps are Discord and Slack. It’s extremely inefficient. Companies are using it because it’s cheaper and easier for them to just ask their already existing web devs to write an “app” than to hire new devs who can write a native GUI.

I really hate this trend if you haven’t noticed already.

Does that mean you can get away with a relatively slow internet connection / upload-download limit?

Yes. I’m using a 200 download, 20 upload connection. It does mean that file hosting is slow, but other than that, things are surprisingly fast.