[shshhdhs]

I disagree with encouraging people to do this. You are not accounting for a CDN here, like the post. A website on the HN front page went down yesterday on a $5 VM.

And S3 just holds your HTML files, for super cheap. There’s no lock-in concern there. You can easily migrate to nginx in the future if you really want, but start with S3

[danpalmer]

HN won't take a static website on a $5 VM down if it's set up even remotely correctly. Traffic to a popular link on HN is likely to get on the order of ~100rps max (more likely 1-10rps). Nginx will handle that with no problem.

CDNs may make a site a bit faster, but for a static site it's unlikely to make much difference if you're on a good host in US/EU or central Asia. If you're hosting in Australia or Japan, maybe it might be a little slower than expected, but still totally usable.

[tyre]

Completely agree. I think many people here regularly work on larger web applications in dynamic languages with heavy JS front-ends piling on dependencies.

Nginx is unbelievably fast by itself, not to mention the optimizations that are completely unnecessary for a static blog. It's not going to be your blocker.

If you're serving up 20MB of JS and inlined images on each page load, yeah, you may want to rethink that. But we don't need to get wild. My homepage is 9.2KB. Longer blog posts (e.g. [1]) can clock in at 20KB. HN won't take that down.

[1] https://maddo.xxx/thoughts/what-the-hell-are-you-doing.html

[type0]

Not to mention that most VPS providers to even speak about nowdays use SSDs

For a personal site who the heck even needs a CDN, the only reason I might use that if I put photography website with huge shots or if there's a bunch of videos as well.

[tty2300]

When I tested my $5 nginx vps could handle 16,000 requests per second over local host. Maybe at worst 10,000 per second over the network

[herbst]

I have front paged on HN and Reddit several times. Often 'only' using 5$ vms. However i was using cloudflare or at least nginx and proper caching settings.

I run several hundred dollars monthly of infrastructure but my websites are nearly all on a simple VM for about 20€/month on Vultr right now.

Web hosting only is expensive when people run badly optimizer infrastructure

[tomschlick]

Putting Cloudflare in front of a VPS is pretty simple and gives you the same result so long as you are sending the correct cache headers.