An Ask HN analysis: How Hacker News users host and build their sites

[MaxLeiter]

https://maxleiter.com/blog/hacker-sites

[retSava]

Suggestion: in the list of stats, after absolute numbers include a percentage, eg "Contains JavaScript: 567 (82%)".

And, agree, very interesting and fun! Thanks for compiling and presenting it!

edit: here they are!

    Contains JavaScript: 567 (81%)
    Github Pages: 146 (21%)
    Cloudflare: 141 (20%)
    Nginx: 114 (16%)
    Netlify: 83 (11%)
    Apache: 70 (10%)
    Vercel: 50 (7%)
    Bootstrap: 45 (6.5%)
    Gatsby: 30 (4.3%)
    Nextjs: 28 (4%)
    Amazon S3: 27 (3.9%)
    Wordpress: 22 (3.2%)
    Cloudfront: 17 (2.5%)
    Express: 16 (2.3%)
    PHP: 14 (2%)
    Caddy: 9 (1.3%)
    Litespeed: 8 (1.5%)
    Open Resty: 8 (1.5%)
    Google App Engine: 3 (0.43%)
    FlyIO: 3 (0.43%)
    MicorosftIIS: 3 (0.43%)
    Drupal: 2 (0.29%)
    Tailwind: 2 (0.29%)
    Lighttpd: 2 (0.29%)
    Godlighty: 1 (0.14%)
    Perl: 1 (0.14%)
    Neocities: 1 (0.14%)
    Asp.NET: 1 (0.14%)
    Gatsby Cloud: 1 (0.14%)
    Openbsd Httpd: 1 (0.14%)

[MaxLeiter → retSava]

thanks! I added the percentages and attributed you in the post.

[aheckler]

I believe the "x-nananana: Batcache" header is included on some/all WordPress sites hosted by Automattic. "curl -I https://automattic.com/" returns it as well.

Source: I work there. :)

[Bayart]

I'm surprised Caddy isn't more popular. I use it to serve my blog and reverse proxy a few services and it's completely hassle free. It's much better than nginx in that respect, especially if you include TLS termination.

[egberts1]

wow, 21% of the personal websites are JavaScript-free.

As one who studies uses of JavaScript in an unintended manner, I believe that this to be the correct direction of future Web.

Heck, I even faked the HTTP version header to be an older Apache.

[no-dr-onboard]

I'm not the morality police, but I hope you reached out to that poor soul running an old version of Apache.

[MaxLeiter → no-dr-onboard]

Sadly they used a throwaway to make the comment and the site has no contact information

[indigodaddy]

This is very interesting, nice work!

Replit does hosting now for any language they support, so I’m surprised none of the sites were hosted there—- although I guess some could have been with Cloudflare in front..

[a9h74j → indigodaddy]

> Replit does hosting now for any language they support

Wow, toy(?) http servers too: https://docs.replit.com/hosting/deploying-http-servers

[MaxLeiter → indigodaddy]

Do you know what headers I can use to identify repl.it? a quick `curl --head` tells me `replit-cluster` is an option but none of the scraped sites had that response header.

[indigodaddy → MaxLeiter]

Hi sorry I don’t know

[splitbrain]

Any chance you could release the raw data (including the URLs)? I am having trouble to get your typescript running.

[MaxLeiter → splitbrain]

Here are the URLs from a scrape I just ran: https://paste.maxleiter.com/post/d64b6728-aa5d-4279-ad25-2f6...

here are the headers and their values: https://paste.maxleiter.com/post/4d142a53-29d3-41ec-a29a-3e0...

[splitbrain → MaxLeiter]

excellent! thank you very much