The post shows where the cost is - storage and bandwidth. With IRC servers you're not expected to serve the all the history forever, with a website around it, persistent subscriptions, outbound queued notifications, etc. On IRC people also pretty much expect missed messages and splits from time to time. Those are very different services.
Yeah but are those valid reasons? Bandwidth is unlimited for most dedicated servers, and 190 GB for 7 years of data isn't a lot; it could fit on my phone 5 times.
190GB in the database. That didn't include media. I'm assuming the media part is not served from the same host since that can easily overshadow other traffic.
