```
accept-ranges: bytes
age: 5397
alt-svc: h3=":443"; ma=86400
cache-control: max-age=14400
cf-cache-status: HIT
content-length: 3013598
content-type: application/octet-stream
date: Sat, 06 Sep 2025 23:14:32 GMT
last-modified: Sat, 06 Sep 2025 21:44:35 GMT
server: cloudflare
vary: accept-encoding
```- Very few sites need to cope with more than a handful of hits per second. A regular DSL connection and desktop PC can host the vast majority of them; you don't need clouds if you don't want them. (Even under variable load: if you need 80% of the systems more than 40% of the time, scaling down is probably not worth the cloud premium)
- If a site can't handle HN, that's a software limitation. Compare Wordpress' insanely slow page generation to simple blog software that generates pages in 5 milliseconds, or even to hosting the blog as static HTML files. I'd not be surprised if you can serve Wikipedia's page text from like one Raspberry Pi 5 per country. Not that you'd want to do that for reliability and redundancy reasons, plus you have the constant stream of edits to process and templates to (re-)render. Media and blob hosting is also a separate beast. Thankfully, most sites are not in the top ten world's most popular websites and you get away with a lot
- 20k peak unique visitors
- 162k peak requests
- 56 GB peak data but most of that data was cached by Cloudflare
I'm currently on free cloudflare plan, and I don't think it shows rps. And it doesn't show stats more than 30 days back
The page is like 30KB + that 3 MB image. The avg ~two hits per second that you get from a HN top position iirc (this is fairly old data though) is 6MB/s for a few hours, say 6 hours, that's 130GB. Unless it's hosted via a wireless uplink (4g/satellite/..), I don't think there's an ISP in the world that cares about using 130GB extra during a random month. Even in Belgium I think the caps were around twice that ten years ago