"Biting the hand that feeds you" seems like an appropriate analogy for arbitrarily shutting down this site without warning.
Cause of YC/HN outage discovered
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Re: Cause of YC/HN outage discovered
#32The 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
do real hackers like working customer service :)? customer service is 80% of a good hosting company.
Re: Cause of YC/HN outage discovered
#33Dear 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.
FWIW, It's probably not worth their effort of working out exactly what websites are using cheap shared hosting and overusing resources.
I don't get shared hosting at all. VPSs are dirt cheap these days.
Re: Cause of YC/HN outage discovered
#34I 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.
There are probably a lot more hosting company employees out there than there are HN regulars (or even occasional) users.
Re: Cause of YC/HN outage discovered
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 g…
I was told in a friendly conversation with one of their service reps that shared accounts get roughly 200-250MB of total memory usage (Ruby on Rails bumped me over, for example) and a "certain amount" of 95%ile bandwidth averaged over some time. I have a feeling they sort their customer list based on these two values every once and a while and send the top X accounts a message.
Re: Cause of YC/HN outage discovered
#36Shared 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.
Nothing is unlimited. It's just sales tactics.
Re: Cause of YC/HN outage discovered
#37Guys, 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.
Also, just going to point out here that Pair.com has had a great reputation in the hosting industry, and has for the last 10 years.
I've been in the industry for 10 years and worked for quite a number of hosting companies, not Pair though, and when you have 150 shared clients on a machine and 1 client is causing the problems you do your best to deliver the warning before it gets out of hand but it is very hard to do.
Re: Cause of YC/HN outage discovered
#38The 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
do real hackers like working customer service :)? customer service is 80% of a good hosting company.
Somebody had to pull the plug, and it wasn't some customer service guy with a headset...
Re: Cause of YC/HN outage discovered
#39To be fair, if I was another customer on that shared host and you made my side crawl through no fault of my own, I'd want your site disabled asap too.
VPS or cloud is dirt cheap these days, no excuses for not planning growth?
Re: Cause of YC/HN outage discovered
#40Dear 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…
I was being tongue-in-cheek, but there is a real point here.
As you say I doubt today was unusual for HN, it's the way Pair went from zero to shut-down.
One of the things I like about the way that Joyent operate as a cloud host is that they allow you burst on shared boxes because of those times you need it. At the same time they'll let you know you need to think about buying more resources without just slamming on the brakes.
Pair should do a much better job of noticing a soft limit earlier, so if a heavy traffic day had hit HN PG et al should have been already aware they were overusing their shared hosting and were planning a route out.