I wonder if there's value in a method by which you slow down traffic by region, while keeping/saving resources alive for faster traffic in a different region (that you actually care about). Surge traffic such as HN frontpage will cause massive amounts of traffic to come in from all over the world, but because this service is only relevant to locals, it would suck to have hurt their speed/experience.

I can scale up our worker count as needed, but we keep it at a minimum since our Azure bills are already insane. Fun tidbit, there's a little counter on the bottom right which tracks live app circuits on the site, we were cracking thousands yesterday, normally it's ~5-10 at most. Did NOT anticipate having this kind of attention from a comment, and we were out climbing in Boulder Canyon when the bulk of the traffic hit the site.

Why don't you host it yourself if the kids is so small on a normal day?