I mean HN has around ~5 Million unique users
Most are from US or from a HN user: population, well technically switzerland iirc (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33450094)
But I don't know, I feel like there are definitely times where people create two accounts on HN or more or lose access of previous or want better names (I am thinking of creating a new account on HN myself) so assume half to go through ~2.5 million users
Over the span of one decade+ year though, a lot of people completely leave the forum and so I would consider frequent users to be around ~ 1 million
Then the people who are actually active a lot of days or are weekly active or monthly active and tonight's the night (dexter reference) that they open it,I would assume ~500k users
I would consider these ~500k impressions to be an average estimate on a really really impactful HN post on front page & they all might come through say ~24 hours.
I am being more generous and assuming 500k HN impressions on 3-6 hours timeframe then technically the server just has to handle like ~46 users/sec or ~23 users/sec
But even on a really high estimate we assume ~500 users/sec
But I have seen some benchmarks of websites/frameworks/languages which are able to handle 5k-10k requests as a really low to decent estimate depending on the task
I do feel like its something that I can architect ~500 users/sec on some hetzner box most likely at max for ~30-40 usd/month or using their smallest plan with cloudflare tunnels for around I guess ~2.99 euros or 3 euros per month
I feel like its definitely possible to survive the "HN wall of death" but any of my websites haven't gone and hit this wall but if anyone of your projects or anyone can anecdotally tell me something it would be interesting & we can discuss it.
Also I have seen this one person who was able to survive this HN wall of death on a literal 780 mb alpine server using lighthttpd. Which if we are assuming racknerd or dedirock or something can get to around ~7$/yr or ~6.70-ish$/yr deal from black friday & you can get such deals on websites like lowendtalk for quite a low price.
Though these providers have comparatively low bandwidth if you actually want the cheapest somehow option and want to survive this HN wall of death. (these providfe around 1TB-2TB/month iirc)
Personally I feel like netcup (my preferred provider) / IONOS might be better options as they are still cheap while giving more lenient bandwidth or you can also find probably some really cheap high bandwidth black friday deals around the 7$/yr mark as well
I think I am getting off topic but I really like german hosting providers usually for the most part except the only thing I do hate a (little?) about them is that I have observed that they have a reputation of being exceptionally strict to the rules/some have the more ban first-ask-later approach which um might suck if your project is a little unconvential or quite frankly it can sometimes conflict with my morals as I always feel a little bit of hestitation around building around such system.