[Svip]

Importantly, I have since set up Cloudflare before the website to help. I am just using their free tier, but looking at their analytics, they say we got about 350k HTTP(S) requests in the last 24 hours.

Had it not been for Cloudflare, I am not sure my server could have handled that. Before I did that, I set up Varnish as a cache provider for users who are not logged in. That is effectively the second line of defence now.

The server itself is a dedicated server at Hetzner. I use the server for a bunch of other things, that see nowhere near the same activity as the Infosphere, and I also use it for my personal screen+irssi setup. But all in all, the server costs me about 50 euros a month.

Though, again, Cloudflare is basically the single most important reason it's not costing me more, and why I have not needed to hand it over.

[stavros]

Ah OK, that's basically exactly the setup I'd use as well. Surprising that the server alone couldn't handle the traffic, as the sibling says, 4 rps isn't that much when you cache (cache hits are basically free).

I imagine 90% of the traffic (or more) is anonymous users, which can be cached, doesn't Varnish handle that without breaking a sweat?

[account42]

4 requests per second is absolutely something even a cheap VPS should be able to handle, even if you double that for peak load. You just need to put caching in front of everything dynamic.

Disappointing for people just carelessly giving Buttflare the keys to the kingdom and effectively excluding alternative Browser users without considering other options.

[cduzz]

An off-hand reference to "350k/day" shouldn't be naively translated to "4 per second"

350k/ day likely means sometimes it's 3.5 million, all smashed into a 30 minute period of time, because some nitwit linked to my site.

And then, I get paged about "my site being down" and I have to stop hanging out with my friends or family and fiddle around with things I don't want to fuzz with. Or maybe it just breaks and doesn't self heal and it is offline for a week until I notice it and fix it, and by then people all think the site's gone.

Anyhow, sure, maybe people not wanting to devote their lives to devops fanfic is something that can "just be solved with this simple trick cloudflare hates" but maybe not.

[Svip]

To keep it simple, this is also a response to your sibling: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41807715

It's been a long time since I switched to Cloudflare. Looking through my email archive, it was December 2015. I uncovered an old discussion[0] about the switch, but it only seems to highlight that the server is slow.

But I think it speaks to my lack of skill in this area. I have no actual professional training in system administration, and entirely autodidactic in this area. Though it sounds like Weird Gloop can also provide guidance in these matters rather than simply taking on the hosting. I won't deny that at times I have felt defeated, and that may truly have been my reasoning for switching to Cloudflare.

Though this post and response so far have given me hope.

[0] https://theinfosphere.org/Table:Server_news! (the exclamation point is part of the URL, in case HN ignores it)