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Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?
61–70 of 195 posts
Re: Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?
#62hey Mark, if you need server capacity I can set you up with four machines on very short notice, let me know. j@ww.com (no charge, help you handle the spike and see if it has staying power without having to get in to long term contracts).
^ This is reason why I love this place and never believe the occasional "hacker news is going to shit" posts.
To be fair, Reddit has a noted capacity for charity and generosity, but I do agree.
Re: Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?
#63"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%."
Interesting. Makes me think that an MVP should be done in PHP or something else that is cheap to host and handles these sorts of conditions well, and then if things look bright build the real site in whatever seems appropriate for the expected demand.
Re: Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?
#64[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?
#65So... what is it?
Re: Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?
#66"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%." Interesting. Makes me think that an MVP should be done in PHP or something else that is cheap to host and handles these sorts of conditions well, and then if things look bright build the real site in whatever seems appropriate for the expect…
Nah. MVP should be done in the technology you are most proficient at, regardless of how fast/slow it runs. Optimize after you've proven your idea.
I think he just should have hosted on Heroku as he could have scaled it a bit faster.
Re: Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?
#67You've since mentioned that you've gone for a 4 gig box with 55 Passenger workers. Definitely a good start.
If I were in your shoes, these three items would be next on my emergency-scaling checklist:
1. Database sanity check: Are you using indexes for calls like "Find user by username"? Does your database need its own dedicated box?
2. Pick up another box for memcached. Full-page cache everything you can with rack-cache. Don't worry about expiration, just use some reasonably low TTL to put a throttle on your read requests for now.
3. Move all of your static assets to S3 + CloudFront. Gzipped, with a far-future Expires header. While you're in there, move the JS to the footer of your layouts. No sense serving any of that stuff from your Linode boxes if they're as pegged as they sound from your other comments.
As to making money? No clue. Maybe I'll have an idea when I can get a request through and see what the app is all about ;)
One thought occurs: this seems to be a very vanity-driven kind of app. Find a way to charge $1, $2 or even $5 for some simple premium vanity-stoking feature and you could be in good shape. Better than advertising, in my book.
Have fun!
Re: Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?
#68http://markbao.com/about
You're 17/18?
Kids these days. Geeze.
Fine work sir, though I don't have much advice to offer beyond what has already been stated.
Re: Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?
#69I created at stupid app a week ago, called http://wonklyrics.com where the point is to enter a songs lyrics, and change one word to make it more... funnier.
Sadly to say, it's received a total of 300 visits. :-P
Re: Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?
#70Well, 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 ev…
let the words become tags linked to the FB account. Such that if users have a tag like "Snowboarder" associated with their FB account - he can build out a tagDB of FB accounts. This way - you could target ads to FB accounts/users that are all "snowboarders" Or you can at least search who among your friends have the tag [snowboarder]. Or if you give more categories to the tags, you can ask your friends to fill in thei…
You mean like this?
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Snowboarding/107496599279538 1,784,641 people like this 9 Friends Like This