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Vercel is down too. My sites run on Cloudflare and Vercel, and I can't even log in to those right now. I'm curious — what does Hacker News run on? It seems im

Vercel is down too. My sites run on Cloudflare and Vercel, and I can't even log in to those right now. I'm curious — what does Hacker News run on? It seems impervious to any kind of downtime...

qeternity 5y ago
> I'm curious — what does Hacker News run on? It seems impervious to any kind of downtime... On a dirty, disgusting dedicated server.
- yawnxyz 5y ago
  > On a dirty, disgusting dedicated server. I'm adding "reliable" into that mix. Too bad they're too expensive and hard to setup for side projects, but HN is probably one of the most stable site I frequently visit, and I don't even think about it.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    I disagree that they're expensive. Expensive to own maybe, but you can rent them on a monthly basis from something like Hetzner or OVH for a fraction of the cost of AWS (especially when you include bandwidth which is free and unmetered in this case) and they handle hardware maintenance for you. Hard to setup is relative. It all depends on what you're doing and how much reliability you need. For a side project or a dev server you can just start with Debian, stick to packaged software (most language runtimes and services such as Postgres or Redis are available) as much as possible and call it a day. You can even enable auto-updates on such a stable distro. The knowledge you'll gain by dealing with bare-metal is also going to be useful in the cloud even in container environments.
  - jjav 5y ago
    > I'm adding "reliable" into that mix. Too bad they're too expensive and hard to setup for side projects I mean they're not particularly. Unless the use is extremely minimal, it'll always be cheaper to buy a small server even for a side project. I use cloud VMs for projects that can live on $5/mo VMs because at that usage rate I'll never break even to buy a machine. But as soon as your AWS bill is even like $50/mo, worth to start looking at alternatives.
hn_throwaway_69 5y ago
DNS A record suggests a dedicated server from this company: https://www.m5hosting.com/ https://www.m5hosting.com/
ceejayoz 5y ago
HN definitely gets overloaded at times, including during big outages when everyone stampedes here. I got a bunch of "sorry, we can't serve your request" a little while back. Pobody's nerfect.
- anaganisk 5y ago
  Doesn’t HN run on top of firebase? Which ties it to Google? People seem to imply its run on a dedicated instance.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    No; a copy of the HN database is synced regularly to Firebase (https://github.com/HackerNews/API https://github.com/HackerNews/API), but IIRC the site itself runs on a single process on a single machine with a standby ready. edit: Yup. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28479595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28479595

Vercel is down too. My sites run on Cloudflare and Vercel, and I can't even log in to those right now. I'm curious — what does Hacker News run on? It seems impervious to any kind of downtime...

qeternity 5y ago

> I'm curious — what does Hacker News run on? It seems impervious to any kind of downtime... On a dirty, disgusting dedicated server.

yawnxyz 5y ago
> On a dirty, disgusting dedicated server. I'm adding "reliable" into that mix. Too bad they're too expensive and hard to setup for side projects, but HN is probably one of the most stable site I frequently visit, and I don't even think about it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  I disagree that they're expensive. Expensive to own maybe, but you can rent them on a monthly basis from something like Hetzner or OVH for a fraction of the cost of AWS (especially when you include bandwidth which is free and unmetered in this case) and they handle hardware maintenance for you. Hard to setup is relative. It all depends on what you're doing and how much reliability you need. For a side project or a dev server you can just start with Debian, stick to packaged software (most language runtimes and services such as Postgres or Redis are available) as much as possible and call it a day. You can even enable auto-updates on such a stable distro. The knowledge you'll gain by dealing with bare-metal is also going to be useful in the cloud even in container environments.
- jjav 5y ago
  > I'm adding "reliable" into that mix. Too bad they're too expensive and hard to setup for side projects I mean they're not particularly. Unless the use is extremely minimal, it'll always be cheaper to buy a small server even for a side project. I use cloud VMs for projects that can live on $5/mo VMs because at that usage rate I'll never break even to buy a machine. But as soon as your AWS bill is even like $50/mo, worth to start looking at alternatives.

hn_throwaway_69 5y ago

DNS A record suggests a dedicated server from this company: https://www.m5hosting.com/ https://www.m5hosting.com/

ceejayoz 5y ago

HN definitely gets overloaded at times, including during big outages when everyone stampedes here. I got a bunch of "sorry, we can't serve your request" a little while back. Pobody's nerfect.

anaganisk 5y ago
Doesn’t HN run on top of firebase? Which ties it to Google? People seem to imply its run on a dedicated instance.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  No; a copy of the HN database is synced regularly to Firebase (https://github.com/HackerNews/API https://github.com/HackerNews/API), but IIRC the site itself runs on a single process on a single machine with a standby ready. edit: Yup. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28479595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28479595