hey Mark, if you need server capacity I can set you up with four machines on very short notice, let me know. j@ww.com (no charge, help you handle the spike and see if it has staying power without having to get in to long term contracts).
Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?
31–40 of 195 posts
Re: Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't even need Facebook connect to try it out, just sign up. Send the site to your friends, they give you three words anonymously, you see them. I need to up the copy on the site.
Then why do you need all those Facebook permissions?
Ah, you're right. This is literally an MVP I threw together in 4 hours.
Re: Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?
#33Haha I recieved links to threewords.me before I even opened HN this morning. I don't know how to solve your fires but I've been asked to tell you to let the text color be customised because otherwise you can make unreadable on certain backgrounds. Maybe you should setup a getsatisfaction-ish feedback/support area?
threewords for threewords.me: hot new cool
Re: Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?
#34This has happened to me a few times and usually the Twitter/social media storm blows over fairly quickly. I suggest getting an extra Linode for now and wait a few days to see what happens. If the numbers do stay up the site will probably be able to pay for itself with ads. Your site is down at the moment so I can't really see what it's about. Edit: Google Cache got it: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?scl…
Rather than get another Linode, for the very short term, I'd just crank the current Linode as big as they go (I assume Linode has super-quick resizing) and tell passenger to run a bunch more processes.
Just cranked it to 2048MB. Cranked Passenger to 55 workers in the pool. Using 400% CPU still. Linode's probably not happy.
EDIT: Cranked to 4096
Re: Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?
#35minimize the server work;
get some cheap nodes at rackspace cloud;
use one node for sessions in memcache;
use two nodes for mongodb (master/slave) read from both;
try to minimize xss/html/js and gzip everything;
cache as much as possible;
maybe even queue inserts/updates with redis and a cron;
thats how i survived a mini fb app thatwent from zero to 44 million users in 7 days... rackspace cloud + memcache + redis insert&update queue + round robin. after a month i even killed the rackspace cloud interface and api with over 80 nodes and growing. had to get the memory limit on my account raised twice. peak were around 40k req/sec. after the second month we moved it to four bulky servers (16 core, raid5, 32gb ram) each cost around 12k dollar.
the whole secret is caching. everything, everywhere and as much as possible.
Re: Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?
#36That's why I use google appengine. It would have handled what you describe without even going over the daily free limit. Of course, you wouldn't be cool as rails.
Re: Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?
#37short term: heroku long term: app engine (just port it to webapp framework)
Why?
Re: Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?
#38Adsense. With only about 10k hits a day, my bedtime calculator http://sleepyti.me brings in $10-$20/day. At the rate you're getting users, you could probably bring in a significant load of cash. Good luck!
Depends on the niche and the website. I have made a blogspot blog and brought it to 4% CTR and $20 CPM. That's +$200 a day.
Re: Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?
#39I recently built a Facebook application that approached the same kind of growth. Sites like this typically see eCPM between $0.10 and $0.30 for advertising. So you're looking at around $30/day revenue right now. Consider switching to EC2. This will allow you to easily scale up to a more powerful server if growth continues or down to a less powerful one if traffic tapers off. Depending on how you set things up, a comm…
Would it be possible to see your Facebook app? I'm curious to see what traits these fast growing apps have in common in person.
Re: Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?
#40The following until you no longer have issues handling the traffic (which might be right after step 2).
1. Upgrade your linode to something around 2 Gig for now.
2. Start playing with your MySQL or Postgresql config (assuming you're not already using redis or something similar, in which case just throw more RAM at the box). Google performance settings for your DB of choice and look for relevant posts to the memory you have.
3. If there's anything cachable, install memcached and implement it.
4. Purchase a second linode and move your database to it.
5. Upgrade each VPS as needed.
6. At this point you get into fancy scaling and there are loads of options. You should have plenty of breathing room by this point though and can plan it out.