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Cause of YC/HN outage discovered

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Re: Cause of YC/HN outage discovered

#22

Post by sh1mmer »

Dear Pair Networks,

I'd like to highlight this lesson in how to loose (or not gain) customers by randomly shutting down technology sites that serve the decision makers you wish to influence.

Tom

P.S. Well done Slicehost.

Re: Cause of YC/HN outage discovered

#24

Post by jackowayed »

PostOnce wrote: post #18
swombat wrote: 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.

No, they they're careful to say unlimited bandwith (and storage and such), but not unlimited traffic. When I was looking around dreamhost docs/FAQs/something either right before or right after signing up, it did say somewhere that they might ask you to move up to their VPS if you're using too much CPU, which could happen just from a whole bunch of static hits.

It's nice for your hosting all of your little sites and getting them up in basically 0 time, even if you need wordpress or something. The panel's pretty nice. I'd at least sign up when they have one of their crazy deals (I got a year of hosting with a free domain for $9.something, which basically means you pay for the domain and get the hosting for free. It's a good way to give them a try with the main cost being that they'll suck you in and get you paying $9/month after your cheap price expires.)

Re: Cause of YC/HN outage discovered

#26

Post by dirtyhand »

The thing I can't believe is that nobody at Pair Networks that was involved with this actually knew about Ycombinator or Hacker News... otherwise they wouldn't have shut down such a popular site. Somebody needs to hire real hackers

Re: Cause of YC/HN outage discovered

#27

Post by bwb »

Guys, shared hosting is designed for the 99% of non busy sites, say under 1,500 unique visitors a day, with the level of traffic HN is doing I'm surprised Pair didn't warn you earlier. A site this busy needs a dedicated server or virtual server.

That is why shared hosting is cheap, you start with it and once you are successful or starting to get slashdotted you buy something bigger that can scale.

Re: Cause of YC/HN outage discovered

#28

Post by gojomo »

sh1mmer wrote: post #22

Dear Pair Networks, I'd like to highlight this lesson in how to loose (or not gain) customers by randomly shutting down technology sites that serve the decision makers you wish to influence. Tom P.S. Well done Slicehost.

150K hits in 30 minutes is 83 hits/second. That's a lot to ask for from a shared-hosting account.

When the traffic starts to impair neighboring sites, something has to be done. Just about any ISP will do the same thing: block the site with the surge, that could possibly make other arrangements, rather than inconvenience other customers whose traffic is as expected/usual.

The detail missing so far is why Pair noticed today, if it was the same level of traffic as before, or a slow build. Was a new threshold crossed? (Did someone's HN-focused tool go haywire?)

The Pair message suggests end-of-day logs will be the way to tell for sure.

Re: Cause of YC/HN outage discovered

#29

Post by jqueryin »

I actually find it quite embarrassing that the guy had no clue what HN or YC were. He had absolutely no idea... and he works for a hosting company. It's quite a shame. I really got a kick out of the fact he questioned the legitimacy of traffic as well.
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