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Cause of YC/HN outage discovered

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11–20 of 110 posts

Re: Cause of YC/HN outage discovered

#11
post #4

Things should be back to normal now. Trevor just moved www.ycombinator.com to Slicehost, and I just told HN to refer to static stuff there instead of serving it locally. Interesting how easy it is to move your whole web site. Good customer service is important when users can switch so easily.

Thank you ! Procrastination becomes much harder when HN does not provide a continuous flow of interesting distraction.

Re: Cause of YC/HN outage discovered

#12
post #4

Things should be back to normal now. Trevor just moved www.ycombinator.com to Slicehost, and I just told HN to refer to static stuff there instead of serving it locally. Interesting how easy it is to move your whole web site. Good customer service is important when users can switch so easily.

>> "Things should be back to normal now."

Hopefully that's the normal of months ago when loading comments/threads etc was quick?

Still taking 10-20 seconds to load most pages. One thing I haven't tried yet is just creating a fresh account - maybe mine just has too much associated with it (Maybe I comment too much etc).

edit: ah I see it only affected static content. Shame :/

Re: Cause of YC/HN outage discovered

#13
post #4

Things should be back to normal now. Trevor just moved www.ycombinator.com to Slicehost, and I just told HN to refer to static stuff there instead of serving it locally. Interesting how easy it is to move your whole web site. Good customer service is important when users can switch so easily.

Any particular reason for Slicehost as opposed to any of the other similar options (Linode, prgmr)? I'm not affiliated with any, though I run my site on VPSes from Linode. I was convinced by a Dec 2009 post by an HNer, uggedal: http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison

Re: Cause of YC/HN outage discovered

#15
post #7

"We just figured out what caused the problem. Apparently Pair Networks' procedure for requesting that users upgrade to a dedicated server is to shut down their site without warning...." I think you should upgrade to a more "dedicated provider" rather than a "dedicated server"... But seriously, not even a warning?

I think this is pretty common. When Joyent shut down my shared account way back when, I discovered it in a comment in my httpd.conf

Re: Cause of YC/HN outage discovered

#17
post #9

This site was on a shared hosting box? And of course they are going to disable it without warning if it's causing problems for all the other customers on that box...

Not this site, www. There was no sudden spike in traffic. If they'd bothered to check the logs they'd have found that the load, whatever it was, was no higher than it had been.

So were they just jerking you around then?

Re: Cause of YC/HN outage discovered

#18
post #10

Shared hosting is generally sucky for anything remotely successful. I'm amazed you got away with storing your static assets there so long! When I got 100k hits in a day on my first blog, Dreamhost promptly shut it down without warning (in the middle of a slashdotting!)

Dreamhost? Their main advertising point is UNLIMITED TRAFFIC!!! I guess I'll scratch them off the list of potential hosts.

Re: Cause of YC/HN outage discovered

#19
I'm not sure what is more ridiculous: that they disabled the site without warning or that they were too lazy to look at their logs or do a simple Google search to find out that Hacker News is real site with lots of regular traffic.

Re: Cause of YC/HN outage discovered

#20
post #19

I'm not sure what is more ridiculous: that they disabled the site without warning or that they were too lazy to look at their logs or do a simple Google search to find out that Hacker News is real site with lots of regular traffic.

What I really loved is that they just demonstrated a fair degree of incompetence to a site used pretty much exclusively by people who are very good potential customers! This site is a wet-dream for their marketing department.

What they should have done is upgrade the website to a dedicated server for free and let that news hit the front page.

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