seriously, they treat someone possibly feeding back 400 watts the same as if you were a MW-scale solar farm
You as an individual are not a problem. But it is highly likely that when you are feeding back 400W there are 1000 other small producers doing the exact same thing at the exact same time. You are part of a (distributed) MW-scale solar farm.
Volume of electricity used is very correlated to gdp. Price depends on what specific electricity generation technology is switched on to meet the extra demand. That can get very pricey (see Texas for examples).
Power prices are set at the bid price of the last generation unit that is needed. Usually this is the running cost of that unit, with no additional premium for installation costs.
In a competitive market the infrastructure costs can only be reclaimed if demand remains high.
The archive runs Apache Hadoop and Apache Accumulo. All data is stored on HDFS, textual content is duplicated 3 times among servers in 2 datacenters and images are duplicated 2 times. Both datacenters are in Europe, with OVH hosting at least one of them.
To avoid detection, archive.today runs via a botnet that cycles through countless IP addresses, making it quite difficult for grumpy webmasters to stop their sites getting scraped. Access to paywalled sites is through logins secured via unclear means, which need to be replenished constantly: here’s the creator asking for Instagram credentials.
Finally, the serving of the website is also subject to a perpetual game of cat and mouse: “I can only predict that there will be approximately one trouble with domains per year and each fifth trouble will result in domain loss.” As of today, archive.today still works, but users are redirected to archive.md.
Logs