As the main sysadmin for the archive team's web frontend (this one happens to be hosted outside of my control) Yes, its mediawiki, no we cannot use fancy cache, JScott has a special deal with the web hoster that makes the hosting damn near bullet proof. on top of that, the overall group is anti-cloudflare. so we are kinda stuck with what Ive been able to meek out of a cpanel shared hosting plan.

Indeed. I hate PHP as much as the next dev, but Varnish and the like have been around for ages, and are easy to setup and operate. Dead simple, affordable solution for an essentially static site like this.

Tbf, the expected audience is small, its not like they are trying to sell something so its critical to stay up through some spike.

The architecture is totally fine for their use case. Arcitecturing it to stand up to hn hug of death would be over-engineering and not really make sense given their goals.

From the cached version:

> Hosting is provided gratis thanks to the kind folks at Tranquil Hosting