Ask HN: Is preparing for the slashdot effect even necessary?
2 comments
Unless this is a purely intellectual excercise, since there is no money at stake here - I wouldn't waste time on it. If you get slashdotted, use it as a badge of honor, and then build infra if it happens often. Just my 2 cents.
Since your blog is mostly static you could switch to CloudFlare's DNS - very easy to set up plus they serve cached content when your servers are down.
I often come across blogs with interesting articles linked here, on reddit or similar. By the time I try to visit them they are often overloaded and I can't help myself and think "It can't be that hard...".
I have a small vps (the $5 digital ocean one) which isn't doing much most of the time. It handles mail, sometimes runs my code and I thought about setting up a teamspeak server. Because the blog will be static anyway my inital choice was S3, but having trouble getting a credit card and the only other option beeing to get a prepaid card I wondered if it's worth the hazzle. And hosting analytics or even a non-static site would be possible with no additional cost if I chose to use the vps instead.
I assume such a machine can't handle more than 1000 requests per second (or probably a quarter of that with heavy frameworks), but that's still such a large number.
I wonder if that is enough to "stay alive" even if someone decided to find one of my articles to be worthy of HN/reddit/e.g.