Computers are fast now. You can serve five million hits a day with a webserver that's a shell script running from inetd. You don't need Cloudflare unless you're getting DDoSed.
I don't understand such comments. Obviously the people having trouble serving HN traffic have no clue what inetd is. Most of them might not even know about using varnish/nginx and that too is fine. It is good that internet is so accessible that you don't need to write shell script from inetd to express your opinions on your own domain and website. A random php running blog will be able to serve far less than 5M hits/day and that too is fine. Most people can't run curlftpfs too and it turned out to be fine
It can be a little myopic becuase it takes effort to understand teh experience of someone who doesn't have the same skills (technical) as you.
On one hand this is high praise for strangers assuming the best about them that they could learn.
Only, the vast majority don't know this, and even if they could learn, they aren't able to devote the time over years and decades to make it easy to learn, and if they can, they have other priorities that makes sure they won't be able to, or they choose not to.
And I don't understand your comment. The author is obviously a techie. Netlify + Cloudflare cost peanuts (might end up less than $5 a month) and you would have a blog that can sustain all but a coordinated huge DDoS attack.
If you're talking about non-tech people then sure but that would be a hypothetical. The author obviously has the skills. He just fell into the trap "my blog is not popular enough so WP is fine". Which is a common bug in our brain's algorithms: we never act until too late after an incident. Oh well. That's Homo Sapiens for you.
Oh, I was using a shell script spawned from inetd as the lowest-tech, most primitive, worst-performance simple way of running a web server. A random PHP-running blog will easily handle tens of millions of hits a day unless you way overcomplicate it.
Millions of hits a day doesn't seem to be the correct metric for an HN front page traffic spike.
Concurrent connections per second is likely much more relevant, and in that case, one can put the most basic proxy or cache in front of the webpage to help a great deal, if not Cloudflare.
"Concurrent connections" and "connections per second" are two different measures which you are confusing. The second one is basically the same thing as "hits per day", and the first one isn't relevant.
Concurrent connections is the number of simultaneous connections a server can handle, something little wordpress sites not behind anything to help often get slammed with on the regular.
Wordpress is kind of a pig, yeah. But unless you're running WebSocket or server-sent events or some other Comet thing from Wordpress, you can solve the concurrent-connections problem just by limiting the number of concurrent PHP processes your server runs (MaxRequestWorkers in Apache), which may or may not be set to a reasonable default like 20 normally. Additional burst clients will either pile up in the kernel's connection queue or have to retry their SYN packets if the kernel's connection queue is full.
The reason you need more than one concurrent connection (again, barring some kind of Comet) is that some clients take a significantly nonzero amount of time to finish receiving the response, at which point PHP has generally already finished executing but is still taking up RAM, which is what limits the number of concurrent connections you can handle with Wordpress. But really all you need to do is not go into swap when you hit an overload, and Bob's your uncle.
Depending on how it's configured, Wordpress may still not be able to answer new requests as soon as they come in, but that's not a problem of the number of concurrent connections; it's a problem of the number of hits per second.
You can decouple the number of concurrent connections from the amount of RAM you're burning in PHP by using FastCGI, or just plain old CGI, or nginx (with probably FastCGI), or putting a reverse proxy in front of Apache, or just about anything except mod_php, but you very rarely need to. There just aren't that many people on 14.4kbps modems any more, and your web server has literal gigabytes of RAM.
You don't need Cloudflare unless you're getting DDoSed.
Wordpress sites served from a shared webhost get slammed by HN and go unresponsive all the time which can amount to a mini ddos.
Wordpress plugins can cache the site but really in 2025 it should be built in instead of the forced paid plugin route that has really made Wordpress a suboptimal experience.
