theluddite.org is under heavy traffic right now, and I want to take this opportunity to point out how much compute and energy the tech industry wastes.
I host theluddite.org on the absolute smallest linode server available, for $5/month, along with several other websites. It's currently receiving well over 10 requests per second, and has been for many hours.
I've been software consulting for years. Most systems that I've worked on use orders of magnitude more compute than they need. I frequently cut clients' cloud bills by 90+%. I find this bloat has two factors:
Some nebulous, completely uninterrogated need to "scale." This is usually aspirational and exists to boost egos vs grounded in real specs.
Devs want to use some recent hyped up tech. Wanting to learn a new tool isn't justification for using it where it makes no sense to use.
@theluddite@theluddite I no doubt get a lot less traffic than you, but I similarily host on a very small machine. A raspberry pi 2B on my 10mbit/s residential broadband. I host my own static site, a home page for my mom (currently WonderCMS), an instance of thelounge.chat with a handful of users, and a gemini site that gets a couple of hundred unique visitors a day.
I also work in cloud and vm environments and agree with your position on ”need for scalability”
@theluddite I couldn’t get a static IP this time around, but at least a public one! Thankfully CF DNS has an api so I have a cron job running every minute to see if the IP has changed and updating the DNS records if it has. In practice that happens very seldom
@SebastianM6L@theluddite I used to work for a place like that. We built and hosted busy sites like London marathon, so the team on the companies own site built it the same way. An elastic search cluster for something that the app itself could likely have handled between app server and cache.
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