php, nginx, mariadb (mysql). The stack that continues to deliver robust, low-cost, and reliable solutions yet HN shits on it at every opportunity.
It really is impressive how versatile that stack is, both on the low end and high. Wikipedia is also basically that stack too (just with apache instead, and varnish/ATS playing an important role)
I'd love to learn how you managed to scale on a single server - other than the above, any tips or tricks? I'm also a PHP guy on Ngnix with MySQL but want to know what tips you might have for a dynamic (non-static) site to handle such scale on a single server
me also , how can it be 1 server ? how do you protect DDos attacks?
They use cloudflare in front, they do the heavy lifting.
Equip your server with a decent CPU, enough RAM to allow MySQL to keep most of your database in it, and fast SSDs. Profile your code and optimize/cache anything that stands out as slow, aggressively cache data that is read often using memcached/redis/etc, use an http cache proxy like cloudflare in front to cache static assets (and maybe pages that aren't dynamic for every user)