At least from my own experience, my own website is hosted on a simple $5/mo DigitalOcean droplet with a simple Flask backend that basically just converts Markdo

At least from my own experience, my own website is hosted on a simple $5/mo DigitalOcean droplet with a simple Flask backend that basically just converts Markdown to HTML and generates index pages and RSS and embed metadata and such. It's been completely fine with the surge of traffic from Hacker News; barely broke a sweat. CDNs only make sense imo if you're consistently having Hacker News levels of traffic.