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Comment by techindex | Hacker News Reader

Definitely the traffic. Wasn't expecting the front page. Working on it now.

I'd highly recommend Solr[0] for searching to cut down the load. Or, if this is a static site, you could use Lunr[1] to have an efficient search that runs on the client. Is this site OSS?

[0] https://lucene.apache.org/solr/

[1] https://lunrjs.com/

Thank you. I will check out Solr. I'm using Elasticsearch currently for the readmes, but I disabled it while troubleshooting so it's currently just searching on titles and descriptions via mysql. I will re-enable elasticsearch later and figure out how to better optimize it for future traffic.

Ah, then there's no need to check out Solr! They both use the same backend search engine called Lucene.

Is the site self-hosted?

That's not what people use the term "self-hosted" for. It doesn't really apply to websites that you created yourself. It rather applies to off-the-shelf software that you use as an alternative to SaaS offerings.

Perhaps we need a new term or two to distinguish between "services I provide through providers" and "services I provide with my own metal" (except ISP and power, 'cause I run my services but I'm not buying a power plant).

At the moment people, myself included, use "self-host" for both.

I know a lot of people here don't like Cloudflare, but they provide a solution to the "HN hug of death" mentioned above for free.

Whenever you expect to get a traffic spike, you can always turn proxying on for a day or two and turn it off afterwards.

Does the HN crowd not like Cloudflare? If that's the case, why not?

Most of the "HN crowd" like cloudflare a lot, as it's quite convenient, especially for personal projects. There are a few very vocal people who dislike it for all kinds of reasons: taking down too much, not taking down enough, centralization, etc.

> There are a few very vocal people who dislike it for all kinds of reasons [...]

I'll have to agree, there are few but very vocal.

Privacy. Cloudfare-users hand a lot of their clients' data to a third party.

They terminate TLS for you.

They can, although they support end-to-end encryption as well.

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