Not to be contrary, but if your site is largely static and you're fronting it with Cloudfare, then you're essentially saying Cloudfare can handle load.

Not much revelation there, right?

Cloudflare really doesn't make much of a difference for HN. The last front page traffic I saw (~a week ago?) was still at most a handful of QPS. Any nginx instance with default configuration serving static files from any modern computer should be able to handle that (given that your link is big enough).

Now if you reach the top of a large subreddit, or have a viral tweet with a link to you, that's a different order of magnitude. HN is just not that large.

Then why do people talk about the "HN hug of death"?

If you’ve got a bunch of images and your site is running uncached with a clunky CMS behind it, it will probably strain you.

The traffic is usually about 40k uniques over 24 hours. For reference, my uncached site is running on Elixir which is often better without caching.

It’s usually not images but rather the CMS making 100 read queries and 20 write queries per page load without any object caching that brings sites down. Even a slow uplink serving big image won’t bring an nginx server down, it’s all async.

Serving a lot of images at the same time will work the disk I/O up in many cases. Probably gotten a lot better with NVMe though.

It’s typically one page that hits Reddit/HN/whatever with its fixed set of static images. It’s pretty much the ideal scenario for the kernel’s in-memory cache.

That’s a fair point for GP’s Heroku + Cloudflare deployment. The OP solar site is a better example of efficient static hosting as it is run on a lightweight server [1] and not fronted with Cloudflare. The reading at the bottom of the website indicates 2.70 W power usage at the moment and over two weeks uptime.

[1]: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about.html#hardware

Mine isn’t static fwiw. Just running Elixir w/ Postgres. Elixir usually performs well enough uncached that you need to justify any caching needs.

So, specifically, why are using Cloudfare? Kind of sounds like you're saying both that you do and don't need it.

It’s free, solid DNS product, gives me a CDN on top of it and stops a lot of pesky bots. Plus moving the domain registration there keeps the renewal at the lowest possible price.

I can’t see any good reason not to use it.

I see. I think I was confused by your statement that kicked off this sub-thread:

>...but I had Cloudflare out front absorbing all the traffic that would have come from serving static assets.

I interpreted that to mean Cloudflare contributed significantly load-wise, then you indicated that your site wasn't largely static or cacheable (I think?).

Anyway, in addition to curiosity, we're also considering Cloudflare to offload from more costly AWS instances. So, just trying to suss out whether Cloudflare was or wasn't instrumental for you per your comments. Still not 100% sure, but thanks for the discussion.

I know people who host a static website on a home dsl connection with 5Mbps upload, using Cloudflare. The CDN literally does all the work.

5Mbps when 56k would be more than enough.