Hacker News Reader

Comment by ascorbic | Hacker News Reader

Cheap shot maybe, but the fact that the page takes 10 seconds to load when it hits the HN front page is a great, inadvertant illustration of why you might want to use the cloud sometimes.

View on HN

The failure mode of self-hosting is that your site gets hugged to death, the failure mode of the cloud is that you lose a ton of money. For a blog that doesn't earn you anything, the choice is clear.

Besides, you can just put it behind cloudflare for free.

> The failure mode of self-hosting is that your site gets hugged to death

Learn 2 load balance

If only it were that simple. Don't forget:

Learn 2 HA

Learn 2 MFA

Learn 2 backup

Learn 2 recover within RTO

Learn 2 ETL

Learn 2 queue

Learn 2 scale horizontally

Learn 2 audit log

Learn 2 SEIM

Learn 2 continuously gather SOC evidence

...

Absolutely. And I never said that everybody should use the cloud. Contrary to OP, it's more complicated than that. Not every site has the same needs. Some sites need scaling. Some sites are fine with being hugged to death, others would lose millions of dollars if they were. Some people are happy to tinker with their nginx config and package upgrades etc, others prefer to deploy and forget it (with cost controls enabled).

Disclosure: I work for Cloudflare, but 25 years ago served my own site from an iBook under the stairs.

> the failure mode of the cloud is that you lose a ton of money

I'm perfectly happy to use cloud stuff for work. I will never ever give any cloud platform my personal credit card. I don't want to be the position of a misconfiguration leaving my finances at the mercy of the AWS forgiveness gods.

OP here. As others have said, it loads immediately for me (tested on desktop + on mobile data + incognito)

The entire site is cached + Cloudflare sits on top of everything. I just ran a couple performance tests under the current HN traffic (~120 concurrent visitors) and everything looks good, all loads under 1 second. The server is quite happy at an average load of 0.06 right now, not even close to start breaking a sweat.

Turns out you can get off the cloud and hit the frontpage of HN and your site will be alright.

100% true, I've hit the front page of hn on a server with an old i5 (aka consumer hardware, and not even high end) with no cloudflare or similar caching, and had no problems. Computers are fast, and serving static html over https is a solved problem.

You're right that serving static files is easy, but OP is using WordPress, not static files.

Disclosure: I work for Cloudflare.

My guess is your caching was misconfigured in some way. It's fast for me now, but before commenting I tried several times and it always took at least 10s to load, often more. Others have also reported very slow load times. I was surprised because I saw at the time that it was behind Cloudflare. Disclosure: I work for Cloudflare.

That happens a lot to blogs deployed on the cloud too. They just need to put a small cache in front and they'll be able to serve one or two orders of magnitude more requests per second.

You want to architect. Thats it. You can handle the 50krps that you wont get from HN from a dedicated box.

Took under a second. What part of the world are you located in?

Only took 1 second for me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com