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Cause of YC/HN outage discovered

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41–50 of 110 posts

Re: Cause of YC/HN outage discovered

#42
post #28
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…

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Re: Cause of YC/HN outage discovered

#43
post #33
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.

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.

VPSes are still shared hosting and are not immune from the problem.

Re: Cause of YC/HN outage discovered

#44
post #40
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

That technology is not out there... A static site might be fun at that level and not causing problems, where as a WordPress site with super cache is fine, but then a Drupal site can only handle 1/4th of that.

It currently is not really possible to track that per user in a shared environment and see who is using what resources from an individual perspective of MySQL / Apache / CPU / Mem.

Re: Cause of YC/HN outage discovered

#45
The real WTF here is why HN considered it appropriate to run a production site on a shared host. Shared hosting is a bad idea all around if you are even slightly concerned about reliability. You don't control the server, so any 60 year old woman running a photoblog with a vulnerable WordPress version can bring your site down just by getting hacked.

Re: Cause of YC/HN outage discovered

#47
post #41
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because everyone you know has one of the busiest sites on the net?

Anyone can get slashdotted. And my time is valuable -- I'd much rather pay more for better service.

Ya but if your dad wants to put up his pictures you go tell him to buy a nice scalable hosting product instead of a cheap shared hosting account for $5 to $10 a month?

Re: Cause of YC/HN outage discovered

#48
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Sure it was, customer service just means a tech who can talk to people.

Re: Cause of YC/HN outage discovered

#50
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

VPSes are still shared hosting and are not immune from the problem.

But they are trivial to migrate between machines on demand.
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