[nugzbunny]

So, if you’re reading this post right now, it means my server is working, and that this site is being served by an iPad 2 from 2012, running iOS 6.1.3 and Insomnia to keep it connected to Wi-Fi.

When I pinged your domain it came back as CloudFlare. Did you mean

So, if you’re reading this post right now, it means this site is being served CloudFlare.

I jest. I imagine you did this to keep your IP address private? Just curious why it wasn't mentioned in the blog post? My original question was going to be if your ISP may have a problem with your set up (giving it's on the front page of HN and will be experiencing some traffic).

[Nextgrid]

> your ISP may have a problem with your set up (giving it's on the front page of HN and will be experiencing some traffic)

Does your ISP have a problem when your computer/phone/etc does a cloud backup? Or when you torrent? Because both of those will max out your upload bandwidth much more than hosting a static website.

I think the concerns about ISPs complaining are extremely overblown on HN, but happy to be proven wrong.

[tombert]

I do use a VPN, but I have torrented many, many terabytes of, errr, Linux ISOs. I haven't ever gotten so much as a nastygram from Verizon, and I still appear to get pretty close to advertised speeds.

[heavyset_go]

> I think the concerns about ISPs complaining are extremely overblown on HN, but happy to be proven wrong.

Look at your agreement with your ISP. They typically segment the market into consumer/business plans where running a server requires a business plan versus a consumer plan.

[op00to]

I have fiber in the east coast of the US with a national provider. They don’t care about uploading, at least up to 10-15 TB/month.

[lucb1e]

> your ISP may have a problem with your set up (giving it's on the front page of HN and will be experiencing some traffic).

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

[trillic]

cloudflare is caching the image:

    ```
    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

    ```

[pdntspa]

wait, top billings on HN brings in 2 hits/sec of traffic? That is an unbelievably low number considering how many sites fall over under that pressure

[lucb1e]

Exactly. I think this shows two things quite nicely:

- 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

[smt88]

WordPress is a static host for the vast majority of users. The generation time is irrelevant. Almost by default, it will just cache the rendered page and always serve from the cache.

[troupo]

At one point I had two pages in the top spot on HN: https://mastodon.nu/@dmitriid/114852056319245427

- 20k peak unique visitors

- 162k peak requests

- 56 GB peak data but most of that data was cached by Cloudflare

[lucb1e]

That peak is a 24-hour cumulative value if I'm seeing it right?

[eterm]

Do you have stats for the peak requests / second?

[troupo]

Sadly, no :(

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

[Retr0id]

Closer to 10 at peaks, but a lot of sites are just fragile.

[wzdd]

I clicked and got a Cloudflare error page, said "I hope it isn't 'run a website'", and then visited the comments...

[repparw]

judging by the .ar ccTLD he's from Argentina, same as me.

First hand experience tells me local ISP's don't care, and/or don't know to care. they don't even serve piracy notices here (I believe most of latin america is like this) so they definitely won't be bothering with something like this

[swinglock]

Well, it's telling me:

502

Browser Working

Cloudflare Working

odb.ar Host Error

[owenmakes]

Tunnel fell down, I suspect connection issue while I was sleeping. iPad was still running the server locally and unplugged from power.

[gizajob]

iPad now resting as molten metal and glass in the corner of the room.

[owenmakes]

I actually delegated DNS to Cloudflare when nic.ar wouldn't take the localhost.run domain!