Managing 10k+ Visitors Overnight with Bare Metal

Yesterday, I Don’t Have Spotify reached #2 on Hacker News, getting 700+ points https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42110877. This brought in 13k views and over 10k unique visitors, pretty intense for a single day!

What really stood out to me was how seamlessly the stack: HTMX, Bun, SQLite, and Dokku handled this traffic spike. No downtime, no slowdowns, no surprises. Just reliable performance.

This highlights how far efficient, lightweight tools can take you. Instead of over-engineering with costly solutions, this setup handled a massive traffic spike overnight while keeping hosting costs under the price of a coffee per month.

Sometimes, simplicity outshines the hype around “scale-ready” architectures.

For anyone learning about infrastructure or preparing to launch a product, I thought this was worth sharing: scaling isn’t always about Kubernetes or microservices. You don’t need to invest heavily in infrastructure to achieve great results. The bare-metal approach can effectively handle real-world challenges, enabling quick and efficient scaling while keeping costs low. It’s a practical and accessible path to foster innovation.

I Don’t Have Spotify is open source and available here: https://github.com/sjdonado/idonthavespotify. Feel free to explore, contribute, or use it as inspiration for your own projects.