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

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

#141

Post by dotcoma »

steveklabnik wrote: post #137
dotcoma wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for cheating (down-voting me twice). 10 million, or something like that. From ONE customer. who could well drop them. So, they're breaking even (for now). And all this while they have raised 360 million in VC money (crunchbase). And nobody has a clue how they will make REAL money. Or do you?

It's not cheating. You made two comments that added nothing to the discussion. They're offtopic and just full of vitriol. They have more than one customer, first of all. They have two. ;) But seriously, if you can't imagine how a company that's collecting real-time data about the thoughts of millions of people around the globe might make money, you might want to pay more attention to Google... Cheers.

p.s. up-voted: you're right on the off-topic and vitriol part.

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

#143

Post by steveklabnik »

dotcoma wrote: post #139
steveklabnik wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not cheating. You made two comments that added nothing to the discussion. They're offtopic and just full of vitriol. They have more than one customer, first of all. They have two. ;) But seriously, if you can't imagine how a company that's collecting real-time data about the thoughts of millions of people around the globe might make money, you might want to pay more attention to Google... Cheers.

so, now it's three down-votes (but it's perfectly ok on three comments :) They could perhaps be useful (I personally do not find much value in the "real time web") - to either Google or Bing. So, one of the following is going to happen: -Google buys them -Bing buys them -Google and/or Bing continues to keep them afloat -none of the above, and the service gets either shut down, or bought up for a fraction of its curre…

Nope, once I reply to you, I can't downvote you.

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

#144

Post by steveklabnik »

moe wrote: post #140
steveklabnik wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The release of Hackety was fairly large, I got LifeHackered, TUAWd... 50k uniques, 100k pageviews over three days. Heroku's free account didn't blink.

Sorry but that's nowhere near "huge" in terms of server load. Even a small machine can trivially handle 150k pageviews per hour , even with ruby strapped around its neck. Spiky traffic is an issue of its own, but it sounds like Mark's site is growing fairly steadily (albeit steeply). I agree with latch that heroku becomes (ridiculously) overpriced the further you depart from the free plan. If a stopgap is urgently ne…

I'm just saying that it was more than I expected out of a totally free account, that's all.

I have yet to use them at higher loads. We shall see.

Also, it's my understanding that they're still less expensive than something like EngineYard, and still generally cheaper than paying for a sysadmin. Dedicated hardware will of course outperform any of this stuff, but I also don't have to think about it at all. Even VPSes involve spending initial setup time and then periods of upkeep, you can't just install and say "done."

Then again, I'm coming from a mostly theoretical standpoint. I don't have real world experience at true scale.

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

#145

Post by cd34 »

cd34 wrote: post #85
Luyt wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last week I optimized some MySQL queries which triggered the 'not-using-index' warning, even when I had all fields which were used for selecting and sorting indexed. I think a JOIN on a nested subselect somehow confused MySQL: when I duplicated some extra restraining WHERE clauses into the subselect, response shot up from 800msec to 12msec per query. Very nice. But the query still shows up as 'not-using-index', which…

MySQL's query plan is odd at times. What does an explain look like on that query? If any portion of the query, including subselects isn't able to use an index, it will report it. You can try to force indicies with USE INDEX/FORCE INDEX which can sometimes help.

http://cd34.com/blog/scalability/mysql-query-optimization/ http://cd34.com/blog/scalability/mysql-5-1s-query-optimizer/

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

#147

Post by code_duck »

dotcoma wrote: post #104
dotcoma wrote: post #91

what do you do? stick ads all over the place! what do you think, you have a business there? like twitter? yeah, sure, raise another 200 million...

make fun of twitter, and you get down-voted. I know, I know, Google will buy them for 4 billion in 2011, but that is the only exit strategy they have. No biz model there, sorry.

I don't know, someone made a comment in reply to me the other day that said "Twitter could be another Digg" and everyone seemed to love it.

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

#148

Post by moe »

steveklabnik wrote: post #144
moe wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry but that's nowhere near "huge" in terms of server load. Even a small machine can trivially handle 150k pageviews per hour , even with ruby strapped around its neck. Spiky traffic is an issue of its own, but it sounds like Mark's site is growing fairly steadily (albeit steeply). I agree with latch that heroku becomes (ridiculously) overpriced the further you depart from the free plan. If a stopgap is urgently ne…

I'm just saying that it was more than I expected out of a totally free account, that's all. I have yet to use them at higher loads. We shall see. Also, it's my understanding that they're still less expensive than something like EngineYard, and still generally cheaper than paying for a sysadmin. Dedicated hardware will of course outperform any of this stuff, but I also don't have to think about it at all. Even VPSes i…

Yea sorry if I came across rude, didn't mean to attack you or heroku, just wanted to set the figures straight.

With regard to heroku you have a point about the "not needing a sysadmin" part. That, however, only works for a fairly short period during the lifecycle of a business; heroku is ideal for bootstrapping.

Once your site grows to the scale that mark is seeing (if that persists, which I doubt) then the heroku value proposition rapidly shrinks.

At that point you start to need more customization than heroku can provide [for a reasonable price] and you also need at least one person with systems knowledge in your company to prevent expensive mistakes in the software architecture.

Gladly that person will then more or less pay for itself, simply by moving the app to a cheaper hosting platform.

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

#149

Post by steveklabnik »

moe wrote: post #148
steveklabnik wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just saying that it was more than I expected out of a totally free account, that's all. I have yet to use them at higher loads. We shall see. Also, it's my understanding that they're still less expensive than something like EngineYard, and still generally cheaper than paying for a sysadmin. Dedicated hardware will of course outperform any of this stuff, but I also don't have to think about it at all. Even VPSes i…

Yea sorry if I came across rude, didn't mean to attack you or heroku, just wanted to set the figures straight. With regard to heroku you have a point about the "not needing a sysadmin" part. That, however, only works for a fairly short period during the lifecycle of a business; heroku is ideal for bootstrapping. Once your site grows to the scale that mark is seeing (if that persists, which I doubt) then the heroku va…

No worries, absolutely no offense taken. :)

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

#150

Post by dedward »

Find your current bottleneck.

Go to static content wherever you can and get it replicated out and hosted somewhere.

consider something like HAProxy (well.. haproxy!) in the stack out front to control concurrency to resources that are bottlenecked - that way you can at least get linear degradation instead of out of control degradation.

EDIT: Drop the dynamic content wherever you can, shut off whatever dynamic parts you can and then scale out horizontally. Then fix the bottlenecks and bring them back online.

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