My blog went viral and did just fine

Yesterday, I posted a link to a tweet by DHH on my blog. It’s about “Google tax”. Companies nowadays have to buy ads to appear on top for searches for their brand name.

I submitted that post to HackerNews and it appeared on top of the front page within a few hours. Until some mods decided to change the link directly to DHH’s tweet. I’m ok with that, although it might not have been bad if a few more people had seen my list with Google alternatives. Eventually some people submitted my post to a few reddit subreddits and Twitter.

But while my blog was still linked, so many people visited it as probably not even in the last months together. And it did just fine. Having a static site (generated with Hugo) is great and having a CDN in front of it with good caching rules helps even more. I checked the CPU of the server and Caddy didn’t use more than 1 or 2 percent - nothing bad would have happened if there had been 50 times as many hits.

My CDN, BunnyCDN did a really great job. Yesterday (Berlin time zone), all my pages together received almost 95k requests, of which only 20k weren’t cached requests, and that includes me using my microblog to interact with the fediverse (which probably has a very bad cache rate).

I suspect the only reason the post ended up on the front page of HackerNews is that readers there passionately hate Google.

Interactions & Comments