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.