[boricj]

Some of us are not serving our blogs through Cloudfare. In fact, I'm using a 5 year old entry-level Synology NAS located in my apartment to serve mine. I do that because it's already always-on by policy and therefore doesn't cost me anything extra to serve my blog from there, besides the DNS domain name.

Badly behaved RSS readers that download feeds uncached are wasting orders of magnitude more of bandwidth and CPU (gotta encrypt it for HTTPS) on my end than well-behaved clients that get served 304s. Some of them don't even set "Accept-Encoding: gzip" and download it uncompressed. That's hundreds of kilobytes per request wasted for nothing.

My blog doesn't see enough traffic to make this an issue for me, but I can see why this could be a real problem for popular blogs with loads of traffic.

[madeofpalk]

I think it's generally a poor idea to serve a blog, especially a popular one with loads of traffic, from an entry-level Synology NAS.

[rakoo]

I think it's generally a poor idea to require spending multiple hundreds of dollars to have your website on something you control.

[boricj]

It's kept up-to-date automatically. It is appropriately firewalled to only expose ports 80 and 443, the administration panel and the rest of the services hosted on it are only reachable from my LAN. It only serves static content, no scripting language is enabled.

A determined attacker might be able to get in despite all of these precautions, but it's at least administered in a somewhat responsible manner. I highly doubt most servers exposed on the internet are.

[oliwarner]

Right, and if you stuck that behind (eg) Cloudflare via cloudflared, it'd be faster for your readers, more secure for you (no direct access) and have no impact on your network or NAS's resources.

Right tools for the job. It's not a failing to use a cache.

[madeofpalk]

You don't even need cloudflare! If your blog is only updated infrequently (>1/day), serving what is essentially static text should not be difficult.

[muppetman]

I can't wait for the day clownfare suddenly put a price on this stuff they've been giving everyone for free. I find it hilarious people who get 200 hits a day on their blog think they need it.

[oliwarner]

That's right but I'm not making an argument of necessity.

I'm saying it's better for both you and your users to keep network traffic at a proper CDN than a home ISP network. It'll be faster for everyone.

[1oooqooq]

except cache is broken on most browsers thanks to https

still better than giving up to cloudflare

[madeofpalk]

This is the second time today I've read a HN comment saying that HTTPS and caching are incompatible.

Can you explain what you mean by this? I don't understand what you're saying (it seems obviously incorrect?)

[cqqxo4zV46cp]

What? No it isn’t.

[muppetman]

I think it's a shame that the web has become so bloated with frameworks and images and video and ads that you _can't_ easily serve a highly trafficked website from a ~20Mbps connection. It shouldn't need Clownfare etc.