Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?

Hey HN,

So I built http://threewords.me - literally an MVP that I posted on Facebook and my friends started using. Fast forward 3 days. The entire Twitter results page for "threewords.me" is of tweets that happened less than five minutes ago. The site grew 2x in pageviews over the past hour.

Two problems: 1) what do I do now? 2) how do I afford this?

Advertising? Hosting partner? ...daresay... investment?

Sorry to be brief. If you're curious, the stack is Rails + Ruby Enterprise Edition + Passenger + nginx, which isn't cheap like PHP to host. On the $40 Linode right now but maxing out CPU at 350%.

227K pageviews today. 50K uniques. 71% traffic referred. 8,285 users. 3,100 new users in the past 1 hour.

What happens now?

EDIT: Hello! This thread is not going unnoticed while I take my metaphorical fire extinguisher to the fires that are happening. Will reply soon.

EDIT: cranked the Linode up to 4096. $160 server, woo!

EDIT: David from Duostack (http://duostack.com) is helping with the load on his cloud Ruby platform. Many many thanks to him.

Well, it's a nifty idea and I know I've seen that trend on Facebook before. But that's also the problem - it's a 1 time use fad type thing. I don't know how much I'd invest in the current incarnation - perhaps just enough to keep the site functioning. Aim for some kind of traffic-based business strategy like ads or something. Maybe it can help pay for the site itself. If you could perhaps take the current idea and evolve it into something with a little more sustaining power then perhaps you could turn it into a nice little side income thing.

the site got twenty two hundred hits within two hours?

In case you haven't watched it yet: this is a quote from The Social Network - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1285016/quotes?qt1307141

First, do not put ads on your site as it will annoy the users. Rather, take feedback and see what it takes to get more traffic. I guess you can double up your existing infrastructure to handle any surge in traffic. You do not want your users to see your page down due to excessive traffic.