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Cause of YC/HN outage discovered

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Re: Cause of YC/HN outage discovered

#51

Post by mixmax »

sh1mmer wrote: post #40
gojomo wrote: 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…

Exactly - they missed an obvious opportunity to upsell. If Trevor had gotten a mail stating that he needed to upgrade he would most probably just have done so and been happy. It's not like he can't afford it :-)

Re: Cause of YC/HN outage discovered

#52

Post by moe »

bwb wrote: post #44
sh1mmer wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That technology is not out there

Ofcourse it is.

Or how do you think they determined that it was pg's site causing the trouble?

Re: Cause of YC/HN outage discovered

#53

Post by neurotech1 »

gojomo wrote: post #28
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…

Yes and no.

I doubt it is a HN-Focused tool, as this affected the static content from www.ycombinator.com, and images and CSS are not the focus of bots usually.

Assuming it was not a DoS attack, a smart host should have noticed the traffic load increasing over time, and offered to upgrade to a less-loaded server and recommend a dedicated server.

By disabling the site, they have lost a customer, and lost on a up-sell to a dedicated server.

Re: Cause of YC/HN outage discovered

#54

Post by gojomo »

neurotech1 wrote: post #53
gojomo wrote: 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…

Yes and no. I doubt it is a HN-Focused tool, as this affected the static content from www.ycombinator.com, and images and CSS are not the focus of bots usually. Assuming it was not a DoS attack, a smart host should have noticed the traffic load increasing over time, and offered to upgrade to a less-loaded server and recommend a dedicated server. By disabling the site, they have lost a customer, and lost on a up-sell…

You're assuming the load today wasn't extraordinary. That's not yet clear. PG doesn't know of any surge, probably based on figures he has access to on other hosts and analytics tools. But what if HN/YC static resources at Pair were newly being deep-linked, by a much more popular site? Only seeing the end-of-day logs from Pair, compared to previous days, can definitively answer this question.

Re: Cause of YC/HN outage discovered

#55

Post by byoung2 »

axod wrote: post #36
PostOnce wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The terms and conditions pages for shared hosting sites usually outline that bandwidth, disk space, number of sites, and number of databases are unlimited, but CPU and memory are not. There's your bottleneck. You can put thousands of sites on shared hosting, but get one or two with decent traffic or heavy scripts and you get the upsell or leave email. That's why I host at Rackspace Cloud now.

Re: Cause of YC/HN outage discovered

#56

Post by noonespecial »

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.

Customers nothing. "I didn't know what that 'hacker news' thing was or if it should have that much traffic so I shut it off". Really?

Please turn in your geek card at the door.

Re: Cause of YC/HN outage discovered

#57

Post by pavs »

CGamesPlay wrote: post #43
axod wrote: 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.

They won't shut you down for over-using resources. As a matter of fact you can't over-use resources, you can only use the resources you are given to you. I know they are different type of VPS, I am referring to Slicehost/Linode type VPS which has hard limit and acts very much like dedicated single box.

More important to me is that I am really really really surprised that Ycombinator was running on a shared account. This just blew my mind.

I have no hard feelings towards pear, I would have shut the site down too; possibly long ago.

Re: Cause of YC/HN outage discovered

#58

Post by DrewHintz »

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 also repeatedly shut down my sites, such as mapwow.com, due to too much traffic. One time they even denied they shut it down -- even though my web directory had been chowned to root, which requires root privilege.

I moved to slicehost and appengine[disclaimer,etc] and have been relatively happy with them.

Re: Cause of YC/HN outage discovered

#59

Post by mikestanley »

Kinda funny and sad that so many people here only see this as some sort of stupid or unfair action against HN, seemingly without even acknowledging that every single other customer on that shared server had as much right individually, and more right collectively, to not have their performance negatively impacted by HN.

Yeah, it sucks that one of our favorite tech news sites was impacted by this, but how impacted were all those other customers?

It is easy to make a smartaleck comment about how Pair was trying to upsell by doing this, which is preposterous. Pair is a well-respected provider with many more years providing good service at a fair price than HN has existed, and I'd be willing to bet will be around after HN has peaked and begins to move back to the traffic load that might make sense on a shared system.

But the fault here ultimately lies with the folks running HN who thought it was wise or appropriate to host any of its content on a shared server that likely cost them less money per month than most of us spend on soft drinks in a week.

Re: Cause of YC/HN outage discovered

#60

Post by ahi »

bwb wrote: post #47
eli wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You can get a nice scalable hosting product for $5 to $10 a month.
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