Software requires physical infrastructure to reliably serve a large audience without any downtime, security attacks, or interruptions in service. Today, these costs have mostly been handed off to central providers, but that doesn’t make them any less real. These companies work hard to make infrastructure costs feel invisible to the rest of us. Content is rarely hosted by users anymore. Publishing on Medium or GitHub, for example, means creators never even have to think about hosting costs. The cost of uploading a photo or video to Instagram or YouTube is paid for by the platform.
