A static site is really easy to host and HN's hug of death isn't actually that intense; the site itself only gets like six million views a day, a fraction of those click on every link, and no syndicated page has much reach.
I hit SHIFT-CTRL-r to watch the page reload under the network debugger so I could get a snapshot of the total size, which looks to be about 100KB, just eyeballing the sums, so at 10MB/s it should be able to serve around 100 requests/second, which is enough for most websites, even ones getting hugged.
The former worked fast and without any issues, but the latter just groaned and groaned and crashed.
During the transition, a prof asked the class which one to use and all 250 people said in unison “CCnet”.
“ Its main virtues were the stark, no-nonsense interface and the incredibly efficient (although complex) database system that made CCNet ideal for running large numbers of courses with very little by way of server computing resources.”
https://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/technology/what-learning-manage...
One of the reasons were trying to migrate is that Rails servers cost us almost an engineer salary, where our other backend is ~200/month
My AWS S3 skills weren't good enough to figure out the CDN + https. S3 static hosting without those was super simple though.