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One application server, yes. HN is fronted by Cloudflare for CDN + DDoS protection, which of course is a lot more than one server.

That's why if you get a particularly long thread (1k+ comments), admins will beg people to log out so that the responses can be served from the CDN cache.

Example: American 2016 presidential election https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12909752 (1,700 comments)

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Not Cloudflare anymore. Traffic goes to somewhere in San Diego from Europe, which it wouldn't if it was Cloudflare (different IP range too)

HN hasn't been fronted by Cloudflare since July.

Hm, interesting. I noticed HN started responding to HEAD requests with 405s recently; perhaps that is the cause.

Why did they stop using Cloudflare?

It was part of their networking rework. Presumably to improve stability of the website. I've also been told that it was a big step towards enabling IPv6 for HN.

There are other parts of Y Combinator that still use Cloudflare though.

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