What is more expensive, computational power or storage in hosting servers?

Question

I created a basic program that can make it easy to write css, make it more easy to debug and take less space.

A basic animation looks like this :

$moveLeftRight|l;r|5px;0|6px;None|

Basic css Style:

.black-square-with-rounded-corners{
  bg:black;
  h-w:5vh;
  br:2em;
}

It can save a ton of space. When server gets request for it compiles it to css. I am new to back-end development, for this i wanted to know which one is more expensive and also is it a good idea?

Answer 1

Generally, space is cheaper than time in programming. That said, in networking, it can often by highly advantageous to limit the size of your files through compression of some sort. It sounds to me like this is what you are doing.

If your program essentially compresses CSS, then the metric I’d use isn’t space, but time. Specifically, load time. How fast does your web application load with and without your changes?

Ultimately “large” network calls are not actually that big for modern storage. 100MB will probably take a while to fully load from a network, but it won’t break my hard drive.