I had an article on the front page of HN, it melted my server and I ended up using a CDN.
Useful lesson, but until you have massive traffic happen once, it's overengineering :) .
Useful lesson, but until you have massive traffic happen once, it's overengineering :) .
From my perspective, you should do what is best for yourself and your users. I think you should definitely be leveraging things like CDNs that are low effort and high impact to save yourself time and help your users.
Not using things that are closed source and from megacorps feels like a luxury that a lot of people cannot afford. Not monetarily, but in terms of time and effort. When I'm working on a side project I want to remove all the friction I possibly can so I stay motivated and keep working on the project.
But if you have decided to self host, I would suggest reaching for one of the many FOSS caching reverse proxy solutions first.
My blog uses a custom CDN I wrote in Assembly for maximum performance.
I also wrote a custom browser (Guess what language) so my visitors browsing habits weren't shared with Google via Chrome.
I will go to the ends of the Earth to protect my users' browsing habits.