This isn't feasible for a large chunk of the population, mainly because ISPs like Comcast love to give you 500 mbps down while limiting your upload to a pitiful 10 mbps.
Host a single 100K image that hits the front page of reddit and your home internet gets hugged to death.
How many 100k image hits do you get on your personal website you made for fun? In the entire 20 years I've hosted my website on my comcast connection I have never had this issue. If you're going to post an image to reddit (which is kind of going backwards from the point of all this) then just mirror it onto some popular image host (or your VPS). This doesn't prevent you from also serving up a copy from your local disk to visitors.
1 megabit of upstream is plenty for a personal website. I can say this from long experience.
If that 15 minutes of fame is so important, put up a load balancer with autoscaling or make sure the Wayback machine archives every post upon publication.
Obviously, if I'm going to share the image, I won't link it directly and would use an image hosting service, or just upload it directly to reddit for them to host.
That does nothing if some other rando decides to link to it.
But wouldn't it solve the problem of your server exploding during your sites 15 minutes of fame? So many users at once could use the P2P of IPFS and take load off the server.
The only difference is that your final SSL termination would occur on a host that's better placed to handle the load. Literally everything else could be done on-prem e.g. at home.
Realistically this 'oh no I got hammered by HN' case is something that is irrelevant anyway. If you're really worried about it, don't host large image files, sorted. The "old internet" didn't have that stuff anyway because we were all on slow connections, 100KB took 10+ seconds to load on dialup.
You don't, the reality is it's extremely unlikely this happens and if it does the worst outcome is high bandwidth use + the image doesn't load for everyone. Hardly the end of the world.
You can very easily host things on a paid server though, which these days cost very little, use another image host or S3/similar when if things went crazy popular.
I think most isps also block outgoing traffic on port 80 these days. At least, that's the issue me and some friends found when we tried to host websites on our various ISPs.
This isn't feasible for a large chunk of the population, mainly because ISPs like Comcast love to give you 500 mbps down while limiting your upload to a pitiful 10 mbps.
Host a single 100K image that hits the front page of reddit and your home internet gets hugged to death.