alt Hacker NewsThis is incredible. How are you hosting all this? There's got to be considerable cost. Meanwhile, this is a genuinely great way to browse through all these files. Seriously impressive work.
Replies
dvrp • today at 5:24 AM
A lot of the files are hosted on Cloudflare so their $0 egress cost helps a lot. Especially given that so many of the files can be considered immutable assets, so we can configure aggressive caching.
I know that Luke was working on stuff so as not to hit the database as much, but I was in the middle of a flight as that was happening so he'll have to come and provide more details.
Thank you!
The original site was on Railway and written in Pug! It crashed after Riley's tweet first went viral, then Riley did the heroic work of caching it all with Cloudflare after waking up to the site being down. After millions of unique visitors we racked up about $10 in costs.
This time we switched to Next.js 16 + Vercel, used Cloudflare R2 for asset hosting, and used Neon as the db. R2 has free egress, and Vercel + Next is cheap if cached correctly.
A special someone at Vercel gave us some tips on caching this one earlier today. We started by just using unstable_cache all over the place, and now we're migrating to ISR + full static pre-generation of as many pages as we can via generateStaticParams.