> it's a good way to illustrate that you can serve a lot of traffic with very little backend power.

What? It demonstrates that Cloudfront or Fastly can handle a lot of traffic, since they'll cache just about everything if you put it in front of a static website...

I think the point is that an individual doesn't need a lot of paid resources to take a website live with their own hardware.

That's also true if you employ a ten year old laptop as I do, quite power-efficient and has a built-in UPS (todo: get one for the router). No CDN or anything and the couple of pageloads per second (at peak), as the HN homepage generates, barely raises the load average into the point-tens.

The software/service you run makes most of the difference between whether it can run on standard at-home hardware or if it needs some distributed autoscaling system (when speaking of HN homepage types of traffic). Of course, if you're serving video or large images/audio, you're going to need more than a few megabytes per second of uplink. Or if your site trains neural networks custom for every visitor, that's a special case. But for regular websites...

True, but that's a weird point as you can use free shared hosting (like Netlify) then as an example that you don't need any paid resources at all to take a website live, but the point of this submission seems to have been about taking a website live with your very own hardware, so mentioning CDNs feels weird.

Ah yes, the very little backend power that cloudflare runs

I think I have CloudFlare on, and I am seeing requests with a CloudFlare header, but I am still getting a huge amount of traffic. I am not sure what the issue is. Maybe the site is so busy that CloudFlare can’t even load it to cache it, haha. Anyway, I have to leave for an exam now, so let’s hope it manages to work itself out.

Changing to cloud flare probably meant updating your dns settings. Based on the TTL of the record and clients respecting it, the change can take a while (up to days even) to spread around the world.

I do believe you have to actually set some headers on your origin HTTP server, to tell the CF caches how long to cache for.