previously AWS IP 50.112.136.166, now M5 hosting IP 209.216.230.240<p>Glad to see it back on bare metal. Thanks HN team for all the hard work!<p>(Yes, I set up monitoring for it haha)
Why does HN run such a low resource site on a single bare metal server (plus identical backup) in the first place? 2x E5-2637 v4 is not that much CPU power these days.<p>An IaaS VM from the same vendor (M5 Hosting) would provide equivalent resources with much higher reliability. What benefit is 2 bare metal servers providing over a single properly sized VM in a managed resource pool with SAN backed storage?<p>I don't think it saves any money, and when those bare metal servers suffered identical hardware failures from a firmware bug HN was down for most of a day and temporarily migrated to an IaaS provider anyway (AWS).
Nothing is wrong with hosting on bare metal. However, this site doesn't host images or videos, tracking for Internet ads, etc. Instead, it is a text-driven old-school site (I believe hosted on FreeBSD). Must be light on resources. It is super fast. I am sure they have some caching in place too. HN's business model is different from typical websites. They are part of YC, which is how it can sustain itself.
We should lobby HN admins to disclose 1) traffic patterns 2) hardware information and specs 3) database size or caching arch<p>Would be cool to know how this thing is run.