10 ms·

If you are worried about getting your blog post to the top of Reddit or Hacker News (I've never been there myself); you can have a very modest web server or eve

If you are worried about getting your blog post to the top of Reddit or Hacker News (I've never been there myself); you can have a very modest web server or even a pay per request serverless sort of thing and pay $20 real quick to Cloudflare if you happen to get popular. It's the Bart Simpson method of highly scalability[0], for static content you can have global datacenter coverage in a couple minutes or so if you use them for DNS to start with. It even works if the origin server goes down. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKU3hMvD31w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKU3hMvD31w

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> you can have a very modest web server or even a pay per request serverless sort of thing and pay $20 real quick to Cloudflare if you happen to get popular. I get the impression that a lot of the critics in this thread don't really understand Cloudflare, how cheap it is, or even the concept of CDNs in general. $20/month for Cloudflare Pro is a steal for what you get. Spinning up a dedicated server in a single datacenter somewhere isn't going to give the same results, especially if your users are geographically distributed like in this case.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  Don't you get tht same for free with GitLab Paged and last I checked Cloudflare was free too for caching static HTML assets?
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    > last I checked Cloudflare was free too for caching static HTML assets? If not free then very cheap, as I understood TFA: Wasn't that why they have two separate domains and serve static assets from one of them, to be able to use the cheapest Cloudflare tier for that domain = those assets?
- superkuh 5y ago
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    > If you're going to centralize in Cloudflare you might as well just skip the hosting the website bit entirely and make a business account on Facebook as your host. These responses are getting bizarre. Facebook pages have nothing to do with web hosting or Cloudflare. Also, hosting on a single server in a single datacenter is, literally, the definition of centralized. Cloudflare distributes the content to a huge number of edge nodes which are spread around the world. How did we end up in this situation where people are calling the distributed solution centralized and suggesting a centralized solution as the alternative?
    - ibic 5y ago
      Yup, I’m still wrapping my head reading these comments, “bizarre” is the word I was looking for.
      - superkuh 5y ago
        Conflating cloudflare's distributed architecture with distributed control is just silly. It is extremely centralized control and the CEO of Cloudflare has already terminated accounts of a business he had a personal distaste for on whim. "Non-commercial" might be a better way to understand this point of view. Instead of prioritizing profit (the reason for people using cloudflare, it's cheap and good) the idea is to minimize the damage done by large centralizing forces on the internet. So, in the above comment I suggest Facebook as an equal option because it is analogous to using Cloudflare. The intent was to get you to think like a human person and not a business owner or employee on the clock. It's short term gain for long term damage to the internet.
        int_19h 5y ago
        But then again, if Cloudflare terminates your account, the website is still up; it's just going to be slower, and you're going to pay more to serve the same number of users. There's no lock-in there that I can see.
- kortilla 5y ago
  > I get the impression that a lot of the critics in this thread don't really understand Cloudflare, how cheap it is, or even the concept of CDNs in general. You’re talking past the point here. It doesn’t matter how cheap if you’re fundamentally opposed to enabling cloud flare to reach its meat hooks further into the Internet. This is no different from arguments about embedding google analytics or “just paying for windows” instead of using Linux.
  - manigandham 5y ago
    CDNs are a commodity business with tons of competition. Cloudflare is winning by offering a better product. You should take issue with all the other companies that have failed to deliver something as compelling.
    - capableweb 5y ago
      I don't think the problem is a specific CDN. Is that everyone ends up using the same CDN, so when Cloudflare has problems, it affects everyone. Same with AWS, large swaths of the internet goes down if AWS does, which sounds great for AWS in marketing material, but less great for the general usability of the web.
  - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
    > You’re talking past the point here What point? Nobody said anything about "cloud flare to reach its meat hooks" in the article or the above thread except you?
    - fivea 5y ago
      > What point? Nobody said anything about "cloud flare to reach its meat hooks" in the article or the above thread except you? The OP mention "cloud flare to reach its meat hooks" in the thread attacking those who haven't jumped into Cloud flare's bandwagon by putting up a strawman on how that's only due to ignorance. OP clarified that misrepresentation by pointing out the risk of allowing a single company to control the CDN market specifically and serving web content in general.
- bawolff 5y ago
  > Spinning up a dedicated server in a single datacenter somewhere isn't going to give the same results, especially if your users are geographically distributed like in this case. Maybe not, but is the target audience that shills out $20/month really the type of people who have optimized their site to such an extent that shaving 50ms off the request latency by having your edge cache geolocated is really the type of thing that makes the difference? most of that group could probably do a lot of other optimizations that probably count for more.
  - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
    Anything over 100ms [1] is perceived as not-instant by a user. If you wait 2RTTs with 50ms per round trip, then you've already exceeded this threshold. [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/536300/what-is-the-shortest-perceivable-application-response-delay https://stackoverflow.com/questions/536300/what-is-the-short...
    - bawolff 5y ago
      To clarify, i don't disagree. I just think if your site takes 700ms, is there really a difference between that and 650ms?
      - lsaferite 5y ago
        If that additional 50ms hits your user's bail-out threshold, yeah.
    - iso1631 5y ago
      1.13 seconds to load https://www.google.co.uk/ https://www.google.co.uk/ (even after preloading it and agreeing to their popup) 3.44 seconds to do a search for "donkey"
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    > Maybe not, but is the target audience that shills out $20/month really the type of people who have optimized their site to such an extent that shaving 50ms off the request latency by having your edge cache geolocated is really the type of thing that makes the difference? The common mistake is to pick a server geographically close to yourself, only access it from low-latency connections, and then assume that everyone in the world is seeing the same thing. Or to only visit your own site with everything already in the browser cache. If you're not seeing cold start loads, you're not seeing what every new visitor to your website is seeing. Consider the Photopea.com website. The author explained in a comment below that he spends $60/month to host the site without a CDN. Several of us loaded the site and it took 2.5 - 5.0 seconds to load. He could sign up for a cheap Cloudflare account, reduce the size of his server (due to caching), and the load times for everyone would drop by a significant amount. If you're hosting simple, static content like a blog for an audience that doesn't care about load times, then of course nothing matters. But for modern, content-rich websites (photos especially) it can actually be a substantial improvement to add a CDN even if you have a single fast server. You may not see it, but visitors from distant locations definitely will see a difference.
AussieWog93 5y ago
Is there a good service to do this automatically (my site uses DigitalOcean and CloudFlare free), or even test how much load you can handle? I tend not to realise when my site goes viral, as I'm based in Australia whereas my largest audience is in b the US (and I'm a bit of a Luddite!)
- bytebln 5y ago
  https://loader.io https://loader.io is a nice tool for that
  - AussieWog93 5y ago
    Legend, thanks!
    - AussieWog93 5y ago
      Wow, really glad I ran this tool. Looks like with some dead basic optimisations (free versions of WP Fastest Cache and Autoptimise), my Wordpress site can handle around 1500 requests per second on a $5 DigitalOcean VPS before it starts to slow down. On the old site, running on a shared host with less optimisations it would crap out at less than 10! Seems like I don't need to worry about this after all.
the8472 5y ago
You know what isn't served from a CDN? Hacker News. If HN can handle the traffic then so should be some static blog site.
- yawnxyz 5y ago
  As a designer, it's really easy for me to put something on Cloudflare... doing what HN does would take at least more than a few hours (and the knowledge) to set up properly.
- killingtime74 5y ago
  Hacker news is text only though
  - wyager 5y ago
    Most blogs should be as well.
    - icemelt8 5y ago
    - immibis 5y ago
      Mostly text with the occasional picture that's part of the content and not just a weird space-filling header
acidburnNSA 5y ago
I've had my personal $5/mo Digital Ocean VPS Wordpress site hit the top of HN before. I kept an eye on htop, but it handled it just fine. Exciting times.
- wyager 5y ago
  As long as you have a decent backend it's no problem. If you're using some python/ruby/JS thing you're probably going to need some kind of reverse proxy to keep up with top of HN. If you're using a Haskell/Rust/C++/etc. compiled backend you're probably fine.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
manigandham 5y ago
Cloudflare's free tier is more than enough for basic CDN serving and DDOS protection. No need for Pro.
anaganisk 5y ago
$20 a month for a Static site? that feels like a first world problem. I feel like everything is over engineered, unless you need subsecond delivery of your assets which are very huge, cdn doesn’t even makes sense. For a blog whats the point, your site is not going to receive heavy traffic every hour from global locations everyday. If you are concerned about returning users cache your assets on their machine. If your site is video heavy I can understand. I run a Django site for a zoo on a $10 instance, I have 2 others running on same instance. Never had issue with page speed even on 2G or under load my instance didn’t suffer. My storage on s3 is proxied via Nginx and cached on user device and in Nginx, I never even had a downtime due to traffic. I use fail2ban for basic protection. If it comes to DDOS im behind cloudflare free tier. $20 per month for a blog? Lol.
- throw14082020 5y ago
  You missed the point, it's "pay $20 real quick to Cloudflare if you happen to get popular". There is a generous free tier, and for years I have paid nothing to Cloudflare, but I serve 2GB total every month to visitors, YMMV.
  - anaganisk 5y ago
    No I didn’t miss the point, $20 is weeks worth of meal in majority of countries. People from those countries run successful blogs without paying a penny to cloudlfare. I serve much more than 2GB per month without all that on a dynamic site. Paying cloudlfare for that is like putting a tarp over a dumpster fire to quickly hide it. I would rather think why my static site fails like shit when it doesn’t even need server side processing and correct it. I’m not saying cloudflare/CDN is useless, it shines when you are serving huge assets every hour to lot of people globally, or want to secure from bot traffic, or other useful features it provides. Heck you could even host a static site on s3 or netlify for free and answer all the traffic in the world. Remember Google returned subsecond results much before cloudflare or global CDNs were in place.
    - innocenat 5y ago
      Then let your site fail, it's your choice. For the rest of us who would rather not let our site fail, a quick one time $20 tarp over dumpster to handle the traffic in the meantime is good.
ognarb 5y ago
I had a blog post on the frontpage of hn for more tht 20 hours and my cheap Vps for 3€ a month could handle it perfectly since my website is just a statically generated website with hugo.
goodpoint 5y ago
> pay $20 real quick to Cloudflare Once cloudflare captures the web market we'll all pay back with interest. They are not a charity.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> you can have a very modest web server or even a pay per request serverless sort of thing and pay $20 real quick to Cloudflare if you happen to get popular. I get the impression that a lot of the critics in this thread don't really understand Cloudflare, how cheap it is, or even the concept of CDNs in general. $20/month for Cloudflare Pro is a steal for what you get. Spinning up a dedicated server in a single datacenter somewhere isn't going to give the same results, especially if your users are geographically distributed like in this case.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
encryptluks2 5y ago
Don't you get tht same for free with GitLab Paged and last I checked Cloudflare was free too for caching static HTML assets?
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > last I checked Cloudflare was free too for caching static HTML assets? If not free then very cheap, as I understood TFA: Wasn't that why they have two separate domains and serve static assets from one of them, to be able to use the cheapest Cloudflare tier for that domain = those assets?
superkuh 5y ago
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > If you're going to centralize in Cloudflare you might as well just skip the hosting the website bit entirely and make a business account on Facebook as your host. These responses are getting bizarre. Facebook pages have nothing to do with web hosting or Cloudflare. Also, hosting on a single server in a single datacenter is, literally, the definition of centralized. Cloudflare distributes the content to a huge number of edge nodes which are spread around the world. How did we end up in this situation where people are calling the distributed solution centralized and suggesting a centralized solution as the alternative?
  - ibic 5y ago
    Yup, I’m still wrapping my head reading these comments, “bizarre” is the word I was looking for.
    - superkuh 5y ago
      Conflating cloudflare's distributed architecture with distributed control is just silly. It is extremely centralized control and the CEO of Cloudflare has already terminated accounts of a business he had a personal distaste for on whim. "Non-commercial" might be a better way to understand this point of view. Instead of prioritizing profit (the reason for people using cloudflare, it's cheap and good) the idea is to minimize the damage done by large centralizing forces on the internet. So, in the above comment I suggest Facebook as an equal option because it is analogous to using Cloudflare. The intent was to get you to think like a human person and not a business owner or employee on the clock. It's short term gain for long term damage to the internet.
      - int_19h 5y ago
        But then again, if Cloudflare terminates your account, the website is still up; it's just going to be slower, and you're going to pay more to serve the same number of users. There's no lock-in there that I can see.
kortilla 5y ago
> I get the impression that a lot of the critics in this thread don't really understand Cloudflare, how cheap it is, or even the concept of CDNs in general. You’re talking past the point here. It doesn’t matter how cheap if you’re fundamentally opposed to enabling cloud flare to reach its meat hooks further into the Internet. This is no different from arguments about embedding google analytics or “just paying for windows” instead of using Linux.
- manigandham 5y ago
  CDNs are a commodity business with tons of competition. Cloudflare is winning by offering a better product. You should take issue with all the other companies that have failed to deliver something as compelling.
  - capableweb 5y ago
    I don't think the problem is a specific CDN. Is that everyone ends up using the same CDN, so when Cloudflare has problems, it affects everyone. Same with AWS, large swaths of the internet goes down if AWS does, which sounds great for AWS in marketing material, but less great for the general usability of the web.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  > You’re talking past the point here What point? Nobody said anything about "cloud flare to reach its meat hooks" in the article or the above thread except you?
  - fivea 5y ago
    > What point? Nobody said anything about "cloud flare to reach its meat hooks" in the article or the above thread except you? The OP mention "cloud flare to reach its meat hooks" in the thread attacking those who haven't jumped into Cloud flare's bandwagon by putting up a strawman on how that's only due to ignorance. OP clarified that misrepresentation by pointing out the risk of allowing a single company to control the CDN market specifically and serving web content in general.
bawolff 5y ago
> Spinning up a dedicated server in a single datacenter somewhere isn't going to give the same results, especially if your users are geographically distributed like in this case. Maybe not, but is the target audience that shills out $20/month really the type of people who have optimized their site to such an extent that shaving 50ms off the request latency by having your edge cache geolocated is really the type of thing that makes the difference? most of that group could probably do a lot of other optimizations that probably count for more.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  Anything over 100ms [1] is perceived as not-instant by a user. If you wait 2RTTs with 50ms per round trip, then you've already exceeded this threshold. [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/536300/what-is-the-shortest-perceivable-application-response-delay https://stackoverflow.com/questions/536300/what-is-the-short...
  - bawolff 5y ago
    To clarify, i don't disagree. I just think if your site takes 700ms, is there really a difference between that and 650ms?
    - lsaferite 5y ago
      If that additional 50ms hits your user's bail-out threshold, yeah.
  - iso1631 5y ago
    1.13 seconds to load https://www.google.co.uk/ https://www.google.co.uk/ (even after preloading it and agreeing to their popup) 3.44 seconds to do a search for "donkey"
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > Maybe not, but is the target audience that shills out $20/month really the type of people who have optimized their site to such an extent that shaving 50ms off the request latency by having your edge cache geolocated is really the type of thing that makes the difference? The common mistake is to pick a server geographically close to yourself, only access it from low-latency connections, and then assume that everyone in the world is seeing the same thing. Or to only visit your own site with everything already in the browser cache. If you're not seeing cold start loads, you're not seeing what every new visitor to your website is seeing. Consider the Photopea.com website. The author explained in a comment below that he spends $60/month to host the site without a CDN. Several of us loaded the site and it took 2.5 - 5.0 seconds to load. He could sign up for a cheap Cloudflare account, reduce the size of his server (due to caching), and the load times for everyone would drop by a significant amount. If you're hosting simple, static content like a blog for an audience that doesn't care about load times, then of course nothing matters. But for modern, content-rich websites (photos especially) it can actually be a substantial improvement to add a CDN even if you have a single fast server. You may not see it, but visitors from distant locations definitely will see a difference.

AussieWog93 5y ago

Is there a good service to do this automatically (my site uses DigitalOcean and CloudFlare free), or even test how much load you can handle? I tend not to realise when my site goes viral, as I'm based in Australia whereas my largest audience is in b the US (and I'm a bit of a Luddite!)

bytebln 5y ago
https://loader.io https://loader.io is a nice tool for that
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  Legend, thanks!
  - AussieWog93 5y ago
    Wow, really glad I ran this tool. Looks like with some dead basic optimisations (free versions of WP Fastest Cache and Autoptimise), my Wordpress site can handle around 1500 requests per second on a $5 DigitalOcean VPS before it starts to slow down. On the old site, running on a shared host with less optimisations it would crap out at less than 10! Seems like I don't need to worry about this after all.

the8472 5y ago

You know what isn't served from a CDN? Hacker News. If HN can handle the traffic then so should be some static blog site.

yawnxyz 5y ago
As a designer, it's really easy for me to put something on Cloudflare... doing what HN does would take at least more than a few hours (and the knowledge) to set up properly.
killingtime74 5y ago
Hacker news is text only though
- wyager 5y ago
  Most blogs should be as well.
  - icemelt8 5y ago
  - immibis 5y ago
    Mostly text with the occasional picture that's part of the content and not just a weird space-filling header

acidburnNSA 5y ago

I've had my personal $5/mo Digital Ocean VPS Wordpress site hit the top of HN before. I kept an eye on htop, but it handled it just fine. Exciting times.

wyager 5y ago
As long as you have a decent backend it's no problem. If you're using some python/ruby/JS thing you're probably going to need some kind of reverse proxy to keep up with top of HN. If you're using a Haskell/Rust/C++/etc. compiled backend you're probably fine.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

manigandham 5y ago

Cloudflare's free tier is more than enough for basic CDN serving and DDOS protection. No need for Pro.

anaganisk 5y ago

$20 a month for a Static site? that feels like a first world problem. I feel like everything is over engineered, unless you need subsecond delivery of your assets which are very huge, cdn doesn’t even makes sense. For a blog whats the point, your site is not going to receive heavy traffic every hour from global locations everyday. If you are concerned about returning users cache your assets on their machine. If your site is video heavy I can understand. I run a Django site for a zoo on a $10 instance, I have 2 others running on same instance. Never had issue with page speed even on 2G or under load my instance didn’t suffer. My storage on s3 is proxied via Nginx and cached on user device and in Nginx, I never even had a downtime due to traffic. I use fail2ban for basic protection. If it comes to DDOS im behind cloudflare free tier. $20 per month for a blog? Lol.

throw14082020 5y ago
You missed the point, it's "pay $20 real quick to Cloudflare if you happen to get popular". There is a generous free tier, and for years I have paid nothing to Cloudflare, but I serve 2GB total every month to visitors, YMMV.
- anaganisk 5y ago
  No I didn’t miss the point, $20 is weeks worth of meal in majority of countries. People from those countries run successful blogs without paying a penny to cloudlfare. I serve much more than 2GB per month without all that on a dynamic site. Paying cloudlfare for that is like putting a tarp over a dumpster fire to quickly hide it. I would rather think why my static site fails like shit when it doesn’t even need server side processing and correct it. I’m not saying cloudflare/CDN is useless, it shines when you are serving huge assets every hour to lot of people globally, or want to secure from bot traffic, or other useful features it provides. Heck you could even host a static site on s3 or netlify for free and answer all the traffic in the world. Remember Google returned subsecond results much before cloudflare or global CDNs were in place.
  - innocenat 5y ago
    Then let your site fail, it's your choice. For the rest of us who would rather not let our site fail, a quick one time $20 tarp over dumpster to handle the traffic in the meantime is good.

ognarb 5y ago

I had a blog post on the frontpage of hn for more tht 20 hours and my cheap Vps for 3€ a month could handle it perfectly since my website is just a statically generated website with hugo.

goodpoint 5y ago

> pay $20 real quick to Cloudflare Once cloudflare captures the web market we'll all pay back with interest. They are not a charity.