Hacker News Reader

Comment by collsni | Hacker News Reader

Seems like this site could used a caching CDN lol

The author seems to be serving it from their home network at 7Mbps upstream, which probably isn't quite up to handling HN front page levels of traffic

Correct, my crappy VDSL2 connection is not cut out for this level of traffic. I am grateful for the traffic from HN nonetheless :)

I didn't know people still did that.

I would love to, but I'd very much prefer a static IP for that (instead of reverse proxy / wireguard shenanigans) but getting one is prohibitively expensive where I live. Basically, I'd need to purchase the big business package from my ISP.

Lots do. I have since 1998. It's only become easier and better with time. Join us.

Home hosting is neat but I'm not going to use the phrase "easier and better" unless I'm talking to someone with a much faster upload than single digit Mbps.

Single digit mbps is fine for 99.9% of the time. The slashdot effect would take down shared hosting just as easily.

With image-rich content, 5mbps will be visibly sluggish with only one visitor and even a few people you know poking it at the same time well have a bad experience.

Judging by https://unixism.net/2020/05/what-kind-of-traffic-does-hacker... and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30481230, surviving a couple loads per second up to 25 will get you through many slashdottings, and with a solid symmetrical home connection you have a very good chance.

If you have video, you're not going to survive a slashdotting, but 5Mbps will let you have about one viewer with a smooth experience, while 20-30 viewers could watch the same content on 100Mbps. Or maybe you want to deliver 4k and it's zero versus several peak viewers.

The best part about personal websites is that you don't have to survive 99.99% of the time. It's okay if people can't access it for a day. No big deal.

If I want to tell my friends about a new post, I want several of them to be able to click the link at the same time! And not feel like they're walking through mud.

This isn't about getting tons of nines of uptime, this is about people enjoying the page a strong majority of the time they're visiting. That needs a certain amount of speed unless it's a super lightweight page.

It's not like when you post a link in a chat they all load it at the exact same time. It's spread out over a minute or few. I'm currently on a relatively slow Comcast connection with 5 megabits/s upload and it works just fine for hosting and posting links for several (or more) people to look at.

I still do that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com