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wondering how can a static blog can be rate limited :|

Traffic. Huge loads of it.

cheap hosting services do that, don't they?

This is what happens when you run your blog behind cloudflare workers - they want you on pages instead, or to pay $5/month forever on the off chance you get slashdotted...

I'm not sure what "huge loads" means in this context though.

Remember when nginx was written in 2002 to solve the C10K problem?

How would your static text only blog generate "huge loads" on a CDN?

Cloudflare claims that Pages allow unlimited traffic [0]. So it seems like author is using Workers, probably on a free plan.

[0]: https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/developer-platform/

Why would you run your site on Workers instead of the static content hosting? Aren't the workers supposed to be used in case you must do computational work for requests, connect to a db, do some work etc... ?

What do you mean? What is huge to you? For me a static blog on a small vps would start to crumble at around 30 to 150 requests per second. This number is broad because the are a lot of moving parts even in this scope. This results in 2.5 million to almost 13 million page views a day. To reach numbers like that you need to get reeeeaally popular. With some planning a static website can be served billions of times a day before saturating the network stack.

So what are you talking about?

Honestly for good reason. Static blog content is trivially cacheable. Get that content into nginx!

Sometimes people use them as reverse proxies or to load stuff from cloud KV. You could probably build a web stack on it if you wanted to. But I think a static blog like this would be simple enough on Pages or behind the regular CDN.

I got curious about it too, found that author actually did a write-up on that in 2020 [0]. I don't know that much about Workers, but it sounds like it's needed for analytics?

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20250328111057/https://endler.de...

Cloudflare is more IaaS. Some services can be for hosting (Pages) or caching (CDN), while Workers can be used and misused for a whole bunch of use cases. Not sure what the author's rationale is here.

Using Workers is now what Cloudflare recommends by default, with "Static Assets" to host all the static content for your website. Pages, as I understand, is already built on the Workers platform, so it's all just simplifying the DX for Cloudflare's platform and giving more options to choose what rendering strategy you use for your website.

Author here. That's the answer.

Or at least it used to be the answer when I still cared about analytics. Nowadays, friends send me a message when they find my stuff on social media, but I long stopped caring about karma points. This isn't me humblebragging, but just getting older.

The longer answer is that I got curious about Cloudflare workers when they got announced. I wanted to run some Rust on the edge! Turns out I never got around to doing anything useful with it and later was too busy to move the site back to GH pages. Also, Cloudflare workers is free for 100k requests, which gave me some headroom. (Although I lately get closer to that ceiling during good, "non-frontpage" days, because of all the extra bot traffic and my RSS feed...)

But of course, the HN crowd just saw that the site was down and assumed incompetence. ;) I bury this comment here in the hope that only the people who care to hear the real story will find it. You're one of them because you did your own research. This already sets you apart from the rest.