I feel like I've seen more than a handful of personal sites crushed by HN traffic in recent months. I wonder at the server architecture that can't handle HN traffic. In this awesome, far-future science-fictional year of 2020, it should not be a feat of engineering to write something that can handle a few thousand pageloads. I've had posts visit the front page a couple times, and from the traffic numbers I saw, it's not like you have to handle ten thousand concurrent connections. Ten concurrent connections would do it.
The key is caching. I remember 10 years ago playing with Varnish, and it seriously blows my mind that even today sites get taken down by honestly fairly small traffic from HN. I sidestep the issue personally by having my blog (kn100.me) just be a static site generated with Hugo to keep page weight extremely low, and I stick Cloudflare in front of it. That way whenever something I write finds its way to the HN homepage, the backing server (the smallest instance Linode offers) barely even blinks.
My personal site runs off an lxc container on my OpenWRT router, there's absolutely no way it could handle HN traffic. It's absolutely not a feat of engineering to 'fix' that, but it would cost money and there's absolutely no need almost all of the time.
For that tiny one off hacker news hit, your wayback link seems to be working just fine.
Yeah I once ran a Apache + WordPress blog running on a low-end AWS instance that hit not just Hacker News but also some big tech blogs at the same time, and it handled it fine just by having the WPSuperCache plugin installed and having all the static assets passed though CloudFront, nothing else fancy.
I feel like I've seen more than a handful of personal sites crushed by HN traffic in recent months. I wonder at the server architecture that can't handle HN traffic. In this awesome, far-future science-fictional year of 2020, it should not be a feat of engineering to write something that can handle a few thousand pageloads. I've had posts visit the front page a couple times, and from the traffic numbers I saw, it's not like you have to handle ten thousand concurrent connections. Ten concurrent connections would do it.