You poured your heart into writing a great article—and maybe, just maybe, it’ll go viral. But is your server ready for it? Here’s how I prepared my Ghost CMS months in advance, and how it stood strong during a surprise front-page hit on Hacker News.

Daniel Petrica

A personal account of how a self-hosted Ghost CMS blog survived a Hacker News front-page spike with 194,000 requests in a single day. The key was a two-layer caching setup: Cloudflare as a CDN/proxy with 'cache everything' rules, and properly configured Ghost cache headers in Docker Compose. With 94% of requests served from Cloudflare's edge cache, the origin server (a 4-core ARM machine running ~24 self-hosted services via Docker Compose and Traefik) never went down. The post ends with a brief TL;DR and a freelance consulting pitch.

How I Survived the Front Page of Hacker News Without Crashing My Server

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My Stack: Minimal, Scalable, Docker-Based

TL;DR: Want Your Blog to Survive Hacker News?