alt Hacker NewsImportantly, I have since set up Cloudflare before the website to help. I am just using their free tier, but looking at their analytics, they say we got about 350k HTTP(S) requests in the last 24 hours.
Had it not been for Cloudflare, I am not sure my server could have handled that. Before I did that, I set up Varnish as a cache provider for users who are not logged in. That is effectively the second line of defence now.
The server itself is a dedicated server at Hetzner. I use the server for a bunch of other things, that see nowhere near the same activity as the Infosphere, and I also use it for my personal screen+irssi setup. But all in all, the server costs me about 50 euros a month.
Though, again, Cloudflare is basically the single most important reason it's not costing me more, and why I have not needed to hand it over.
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4 requests per second is absolutely something even a cheap VPS should be able to handle, even if you double that for peak load. You just need to put caching in front of everything dynamic.
Disappointing for people just carelessly giving Buttflare the keys to the kingdom and effectively excluding alternative Browser users without considering other options.
Ah OK, that's basically exactly the setup I'd use as well. Surprising that the server alone couldn't handle the traffic, as the sibling says, 4 rps isn't that much when you cache (cache hits are basically free).
I imagine 90% of the traffic (or more) is anonymous users, which can be cached, doesn't Varnish handle that without breaking a sweat?