This is offtopic but what should be size of the VM to handle HN's front page traffic. I know a lot of it depends upon whether the website is static or is backed by DB and on various different factors. But many a times some of my friends ask me questions like this.

To make it simple, lets take 2 very basic websites.

1. A ghost blog. (node.js) 2. A wordpress blog backed by a mysql db. (php)

I had a ghost blog on a micro instance of a german VPN, a machine with 256mb of ram and not too fast processing power. Both times I reached HN home page, in one case for some hours, it worked without issues and only a minor slowdown.

VPN was meant to be VPS but I cannot edit the post

Thank you - was a bit of an unexpected appearance here so getting onto the erm, technical issues, now...

A quick solution could be to host the page as a static page and have a nginx route serve that page.

Thanks - kicked off a resize, that may not have been the best idea. That'll teach me for hanging on to mainframe-era blogging technology :-)

Mainframe-era blog tech, eh?

http://www.coboloncogs.org/INDEX.HTM

I needed that laugh!

And some good news, serving a static copy from the original domain/URL, so all might not be lost :-)

It's funny until you run into a group of people actually using COBOL to run their website.

HTML caching at nginx level would do the trick as well, assuming you have enough bandwidth.