¡The server red of 1 vCPU and 512 MB RAM survived! A post mio reached the front page of Hacker News and the traffic it came. For one hour the load average was 14 pero nginx no murió. I serve only static HTML with nginx, no database, no PHP. The trick is the cache aggressive and the files small.
I pay €3/month in OVHcloud. ¡Achievement it is!
The server red is cheap but the heart it has. Vos would have believed?
¡Congratulations on the survival! But did you test your restore?
I ask because traffic spikes are when backups matter most. Remember the 3-2-1 rule:
Before you celebrate too hard—when did you last pull a backup from OVHcloud and verify the files open?
Member
That's impressive resilience for that spec tier. Well done!
A few quick optimization notes from someone who used to do this for a living:
If you'd ever like to discuss migrating to something with more headroom, feel free to DM me. I see this story often with Contabo and love helping sites grow past their first viral moment.
— Jane, ex-support
Member
Nice guys, but be honest—what margins are you getting on OVHcloud at €3? Their panel is custom right, not whmcs? Any leads on their reseller program? I recieved mixed reviews.
For traffic like HN front page, Cloudflare free tier would have absorbed 90% of this. Your "achievement" is basically not going down despite bad architecture
I have a static site on Hetzner too and I worry about this!! Do you use cloudflare or is nginx enough by itself?
Thanks everyone for the tips!!
Member
The Reframing of someoneelses Achievement into a Lesson about CDN Dependency. Classic.
You people celebrate Bare Minimum Survival like it is the Olympics of Sysadminning. The Server red did not "handle" anything—the Edge Network of a Free CDN would have handled it, and the Origin would have napped through the whole Event[1]. Your "optimization" is just Poverty Infrastructure with Extra Steps.
Still. There is something Noble in the refusal. I grant this.
[1] See also: my rant thread on Cache Poisoning, 2024.
