Why would you build your blog to fail if some article on it ever gets popular? The fact that the most hits you ever received was 50k in a week isn't relevant; a single important post could receive that in seconds.
It basically costs nothing to pre-render a static site, which then serves several orders of magnitude faster. I'm confused why anyone would do it this way in this day and age.
My blog is yet to fail and I don't believe in premature optimization. I had 50k in a day once in the past and it was ok. If more than that happens in seconds and the blog fails, so be it. It doesn't affect my life at all, I fail too sometimes.
I considered monitoring popular posts and prerendering those. Feels like code bloat for something that might not happen.
Don't get me wrong, this blog used to prerender everything. It kinda sucked to compute which pages were affected by a change in any given page as it might need to patch indexes, cross linked references, and so on. It can be done of course, or you can simply re-render everything anyway. The added friction for development and maintenance was not worth it for me.
It is my personal blog, it is not a personal branding site to show people my cool web skills or anything. If it goes down, let it go down.
By large I agree, its just common best practices these days. Or at least have some components statically generated like the rss feed.
I know some will go 'oh well I want a web interface to create or edit posts in', nothing says you cant just implement that part dynamic and have it update static components on modification of posts.
it used to work like that. At the moment, the dynamic pages take miliseconds to rende and ship. Even though static files would be a an order of magnitude faster, we're talking about it already being fast enough for 99% of the time it is needed and that is good enough. Reducing my time and friction maintaining and using my own blog is more important and having five sigma of uptime.
It basically costs nothing to pre-render a static site, which then serves several orders of magnitude faster. I'm confused why anyone would do it this way in this day and age.