HN is just one active and one standby server at M5 Computer Security running BSD.

There are things out there which are running from a bare metal host, without relying on someone else's computer (aka the cloud). HN is one of them.

They stopped using Cloudflare some time ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18188832

Because HN doesn't use Cloudflare.

Also doesn't use AWS or Azure because it didn't go down with them either.

HN sometimes rarely is pointed to AWS when under attack.

Does HN self-host too?

I'd love to read an article describing the HN setup. Seems that they got a lot of things right - self registration, influx of people during outages and plenty others. Admins, if you see this, please write about your craft!

I am pretty sure @dang wrote about it on here before, but I can't seem to find it.

Seems like so, these submissions from them look related, but not quite it:

- [Sorry I broke the server](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9052128)

- [New attempt at mobile markup](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10489499)

- [Clickable domains and QoL](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223645)

- [New features and a moderator](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073675)

- [Thanks to thehodge and littlewarden, this site is up today](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28472350)

Maybe one day. Seeing all of these big providers stumbling, an article about HN staying on top of everything would surely resonate.

Here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28478379 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27452276

Thanks! Seems that's what we'll get as there are apparently serious money which can be made by knowing the guts of HN as per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27454354.

Yes, except when we've shot ourselves in both feet:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45750608

How? It's literally impossible to run a major website these days without Cloudflare.

/s

This is what you get for being lazy and choosing to making the internet more centralized.

Well, to be fair, while recognizing how influential it is, HN is not a major website lol

What counts as major? I estimate they get millions of hits here

HN is running on the server the rest of the cloud rents time from.

The outages are the Roomba.

FreeBSD on bare metal hooked up to a nice network.