Well, unrelated to the topic, but I'd be curious how many request / sec you were getting, and how many nodes Render autoscaled up to. I'm running a client's site on a single Render node right now and have been curious how it'd stand up to traffic spikes.

I can't tell from the logs that I can see. But the site is all or almost all text from Render with images on AWS, and bandwidth topped out at "220MB" (per hour? Not sure) from Render this morning. It came back up as soon as I enabled scaling, and it only scaled to 3 nodes.

It's also a Python 3 instance running Django/Wagtail/Puput, and all blame goes to me for poor coding. If anyone reading this happens to be a Wagtail & Render expert and wants some short contract work fixing my code, please reach out (arussell@shawkeller.com)!

I recently had an unoptimized Django site running on render.com with the `plan: standard` setting survive the HN front page with a single node. I had autoscale set to on, but it never needed to scale up.

I don't know the requests/second, but at peak on Google Analytics it said that 300 people were on the site "right now" -- unsure of what that corresponds to. ~5-10 reqs/s roughly?

Also note that render.com puts Cloudflare in "front" of the nodes automatically, which helps with some caching.

(I'm unaffiliated btw, just moved to them from Heroku and have been happy to far)

> Google Analytics

Hardly effective for gauging HN readership, given the abundant use of ad blockers. Based on no evidence whatsoever, 100x that and you should have a reliable estimate.

What made you remove it?

We have readers at the Delaware courthouse and, incredibly, the courthouse network setup blocks the site for Chrome users if I use Cloudflare. I tried for weeks to find a solution other than removing Cloudflare but nothing seemed to work, and I really want people from the courthouse to be able to read the blog!

Worth debugging. Please email me at marek at cloudflare dot com

> the courthouse network setup blocks the site for Chrome users if I use Cloudflare

Lovely.

As my local county attorney told the court, "We will not be using the cloud because it is not secure," this doesn't surprise me. The bane of local governments strikes again.

Aren't they correct?

I would ballpark Delaware court IT security requirements as similar to DoD Secret level clearance.

And as far as I understand a higher security cloud solution is usually a custom ask and really expensive at any of the major providers, simply not affordable for smaller organizations.

> Aren't they correct?

Not in my professional estimation, unless you want to reduce the argument to absurdly pedantic levels.

My quick response to the county government was for immediate effect, "The CIA uses AWS."

So do you know how much more expensive a solution, that can meet their Secret classification, is compared to regular AWS?

Most of the cloud providers (at least AWS/Azure) charge about 15-20% more for the "government" data centers. It's really not that much more. It's also not really much different, just slightly more auditing, if any difference at all. You also don't have to strictly be a government agency, you can also be a government contractor.

From what I understand, the infrastructure is really, technically, exactly the same, but just limited to certain customers. It's also, generally speaking going to be as, or more secure than any self-managed datacenter connected to the internet. The transparency could probably be a bit better.

note: used to work for a government contractor that received a LOT of hacking effort as a target.

“There is no cloud it’s just [computers]”

Since “cloud” is actually a marketing term (usually meaning virtualized servers), any company or department who says no to any mention of using the cloud is showing willful ignorance.

If you know you don’t know enough, demanding paper documents makes sense. It takes quite a bit of study and knowledge to determine that a “cloud document” cannot be changed or altered after submission (and by whom).

Or the ability to trust subject-matter experts who know better than you.

One thing judges know is how they can get burned by experts - and they know to whom the liability falls if something goes wrong.

Can you intercept their network and redirect it to a copy hosted elsewhere or on another CDN?

Blocking cloudflare blocks half the internet so I presume there’s something else going on somewhere.

Generally Cloudflare is integrated as the DNS level. In most configurations that would prevent intercepting their network requests and redirecting them to a copy hosted elsewhere or on another CDN.

Pretty much every CDN works the same way or very similarly.

Glad to hear scaling went well! Maybe we should automatically ping you about the autoscaling option when your traffic spikes.