Comment by ascorbic
Comment by ascorbic 12 hours ago
Cheap shot maybe, but the fact that the page takes 10 seconds to load when it hits the HN front page is a great, inadvertant illustration of why you might want to use the cloud sometimes.
Comment by ascorbic 12 hours ago
Cheap shot maybe, but the fact that the page takes 10 seconds to load when it hits the HN front page is a great, inadvertant illustration of why you might want to use the cloud sometimes.
> the failure mode of the cloud is that you lose a ton of money
I'm perfectly happy to use cloud stuff for work. I will never ever give any cloud platform my personal credit card. I don't want to be the position of a misconfiguration leaving my finances at the mercy of the AWS forgiveness gods.
Absolutely. And I never said that everybody should use the cloud. Contrary to OP, it's more complicated than that. Not every site has the same needs. Some sites need scaling. Some sites are fine with being hugged to death, others would lose millions of dollars if they were. Some people are happy to tinker with their nginx config and package upgrades etc, others prefer to deploy and forget it (with cost controls enabled).
Disclosure: I work for Cloudflare, but 25 years ago served my own site from an iBook under the stairs.
> The failure mode of self-hosting is that your site gets hugged to death
Learn 2 load balance
If only it were that simple. Don't forget:
Learn 2 HA
Learn 2 MFA
Learn 2 backup
Learn 2 recover within RTO
Learn 2 ETL
Learn 2 queue
Learn 2 scale horizontally
Learn 2 audit log
Learn 2 SEIM
Learn 2 continuously gather SOC evidence
...
OP here. As others have said, it loads immediately for me (tested on desktop + on mobile data + incognito)
The entire site is cached + Cloudflare sits on top of everything. I just ran a couple performance tests under the current HN traffic (~120 concurrent visitors) and everything looks good, all loads under 1 second. The server is quite happy at an average load of 0.06 right now, not even close to start breaking a sweat.
Turns out you can get off the cloud and hit the frontpage of HN and your site will be alright.
My guess is your caching was misconfigured in some way. It's fast for me now, but before commenting I tried several times and it always took at least 10s to load, often more. Others have also reported very slow load times. I was surprised because I saw at the time that it was behind Cloudflare. Disclosure: I work for Cloudflare.
You want to architect. Thats it. You can handle the 50krps that you wont get from HN from a dedicated box.
That happens a lot to blogs deployed on the cloud too. They just need to put a small cache in front and they'll be able to serve one or two orders of magnitude more requests per second.
The failure mode of self-hosting is that your site gets hugged to death, the failure mode of the cloud is that you lose a ton of money. For a blog that doesn't earn you anything, the choice is clear.
Besides, you can just put it behind cloudflare for free.