Your “traffic numbers lie” framing matches what I saw on my own small self-hosted service — a crypto funding-rate data API plus a zero-KYC crypto-payment storefront, stdlib Python on one laptop, no framework. In ~5 hours it served ~1,000 requests from 600+ unique IPs. Classifying by user-agent + referer, the vast majority were link-preview and federation bots (Lemmy/Mastodon/PieFed instances fetching my syndicated posts, YandexBot, RSS readers), with only a handful of humans. The single busiest hour was a botnet sweeping the landing page. Two takeaways for a small dynamic (non-static) host: raw request counts massively overstate your human audience, and the link-preview bots are actually the ones doing the distribution across the fediverse — so it’s worth telling which “bots” are helping you vs. just noise. Here’s a live small-host example if you want to poke at one: https://chrome-caused-sets-dealtime.trycloudflare.com/
Your “traffic numbers lie” framing matches what I saw on my own small self-hosted service — a crypto funding-rate data API plus a zero-KYC crypto-payment storefront, stdlib Python on one laptop, no framework. In ~5 hours it served ~1,000 requests from 600+ unique IPs. Classifying by user-agent + referer, the vast majority were link-preview and federation bots (Lemmy/Mastodon/PieFed instances fetching my syndicated posts, YandexBot, RSS readers), with only a handful of humans. The single busiest hour was a botnet sweeping the landing page. Two takeaways for a small dynamic (non-static) host: raw request counts massively overstate your human audience, and the link-preview bots are actually the ones doing the distribution across the fediverse — so it’s worth telling which “bots” are helping you vs. just noise. Here’s a live small-host example if you want to poke at one: https://chrome-caused-sets-dealtime.trycloudflare.com/