Hacker News Reader

Comment by indigodaddy | Hacker News Reader

Question might be is it still hosted on a phone... DNS resolves to a residential ISP range, and the site seems to be holding up quite well still, so not sure

View on HN

Hello, not OP but I can confirm after >10 years of doing it that hosting on reused portable hardware from a home connection is not just viable, it's cheap and stable. No issues with handling the HN frontpage here either

What portable hw are you using?

Old laptops mainly. At some point an Asus EEE PC. Currently it's a 2012 laptop that I used as daily driver for five years

Blog author has confirmed that it's still running on the phone. Also it seems to have handled the HN traffic beautifully and without a hitch. Loading extremely fast (as I've been randomly sporadically checking it since it's been on the front page) the whole time. Don't believe there is any CDN involved as the domain resolves to a residential ISP range. Impressive!

Blog was Posted on Aug 29, 2024

I don't think it would suddenly be hosted on something else in the very few days since.

Edited to add: I don't think it's hosted via a phone with a SIM, it would appear that the device is connected to their home network.

Also: Haha, ooops, 2024 (not 2025!)

Right, connected to the home lan would make sense, especially considering they detailed that it's fronted by nginx on another machine. curl -v does reveal nginx serving. I guess I was thinking maybe a phone wouldn't handle the HN load, but probably a mistaken assumption as it is after all a static site (believe it's Hugo generated html) and Pixel 5 likely has decent CPU and RAM (or at least plenty for static requests probably).

USB ethernet tether might be the “how” here. Or some sort of VPN (tailscale) to the home LAN that the phone is hooked up to. Not quite “off-grid”.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com