[lucb1e]

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...