> And yet it’s got basically perfect uptime.

Some monitors indicate that hackernews has a 99.84% uptime in the past 30 days. Hardly "perfect".

https://hacker-news.statuspal.io/

And that still doesn't include the very short term soft-failures where HN tells you "something happened, try again" - those happen every week or so.

This site is also quite an easy service to run - it's all text, with very few customizations that affect the frontpage that everyone sees.