Host your website on Netlify and Cloudflare so you don't have to worry about bandwidth, power/network interruption
Yes, it does make deploys easier. You don't "have to think" anymore. Well, that's the argument.
I self-host by creating a git bare repo on a server, ala `git init --bare mysite.com.git` and cloning that repo again for the web server (`git clone mysite.com.git mysite.com`). Now add this git hook in the bare repo:
#!/bin/bash
cd /home/ryan/mysite.com
unset GIT_DIR
git restore .
git pull
exec ./build.sh >/dev/null
Now my deploys take a second and become visible immediately. If you are intending on serving 1000s of requests per second, sure you might need CDNs and caching. But... if your hosting a portfolio/blog website, you might not need it. On top of that, demonstrating knowledge of backends is never a bad thing for a personal website.2. Using a good CDN ensures your site is fairly responsive on (hopefully) all continents. Your server probably isn’t. Your closet server — even less.
As for responsiveness, it’s a good thing to proactively prepare for an HN hug of death ;) It also starts to matter when the traffic crosses into 100k a day, as is the case in TFA.