Computers are fast now. You can serve five million hits a day with a webserver that's a shell script running from inetd. You don't need Cloudflare unless you're getting DDoSed.
I don't understand such comments. Obviously the people having trouble serving HN traffic have no clue what inetd is. Most of them might not even know about using varnish/nginx and that too is fine. It is good that internet is so accessible that you don't need to write shell script from inetd to express your opinions on your own domain and website. A random php running blog will be able to serve far less than 5M hits/day and that too is fine. Most people can't run curlftpfs too and it turned out to be fine
Contact with curious internet traffic crippling a non cloudflared webserver might not be.