HN won't take a static website on a $5 VM down if it's set up even remotely correctly. Traffic to a popular link on HN is likely to get on the order of ~100rps max (more likely 1-10rps). Nginx will handle that with no problem.
CDNs may make a site a bit faster, but for a static site it's unlikely to make much difference if you're on a good host in US/EU or central Asia. If you're hosting in Australia or Japan, maybe it might be a little slower than expected, but still totally usable.
Completely agree. I think many people here regularly work on larger web applications in dynamic languages with heavy JS front-ends piling on dependencies.
Nginx is unbelievably fast by itself, not to mention the optimizations that are completely unnecessary for a static blog. It's not going to be your blocker.
If you're serving up 20MB of JS and inlined images on each page load, yeah, you may want to rethink that. But we don't need to get wild. My homepage is 9.2KB. Longer blog posts (e.g. [1]) can clock in at 20KB. HN won't take that down.
Not to mention that most VPS providers to even speak about nowdays use SSDs
For a personal site who the heck even needs a CDN, the only reason I might use that if I put photography website with huge shots or if there's a bunch of videos as well.
Yep this doesn't surprise me at all. A stock install of nginx with no tuning at all was reaching 26k rps on my 2013 MacBook Pro when I tested it years ago.
CDNs may make a site a bit faster, but for a static site it's unlikely to make much difference if you're on a good host in US/EU or central Asia. If you're hosting in Australia or Japan, maybe it might be a little slower than expected, but still totally usable.