A few hours on the Hacker News front page
A blog post about RFC 8950 unexpectedly made it to the Hacker News front page, bringing around 40,000 visits. A look at how my self-hosted, multi-server Hugo setup handled the traffic.
Hugo
Self hosting website with high availability
This post covers how I self hosted this blog with availability and geo distribution.
Understanding three phase power
Migration to Hugo
I have migrated this 14-year-old blog from a dynamic WordPress (based on WordPress) to a static website (based on Hugo). It was a pretty lengthy process even when I had scripts converting the WordPress XML export into markdown files.
Why a static site?
This gives a few advantages like:
- Must faster rendering as all the pages are generated well in advance & pushed to the server
- Better security (as the backend is not at all exposed unlike WordPress where backend admin portal was visible & behind an authenticated URL)
- Easy to distribute and put behind CDN
- Easy to type posts as now it’s just markdown
I haven’t finalised the hosting location for this newer site. For now, it’s on Google Cloud firebase but I am still just playing with the options. If I get some free time, I might just tweak my PowerDNS setup to start using GeoIP data for the request and serve the local server in a given country. That way I can host the website in India, Europe and US and let authoritative DNS steer the traffic. More on this later!