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Bulletproof your blog – survive the Hacker News effect

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Re: Bulletproof your blog – survive the Hacker News effect

#11

Post by sirn »

ck2 wrote: post #6

Save dynamic page as html from browser. Upload to server as html. Add.htaccess rule to redirect old dynamic page to static page. (when traffic dies, remove rule) Or if you are running WordPress, just install wp-super-cache and when a traffic spike happens, click the "lockdown" button.

Easier: just put this into your .htaccess on traffic spike.

    Header append X-Coral-Control "redirect-home"
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^CoralWebPrx
    RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !(^|&)coral-no-serve$
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://your.domain.nyud.net/$1 [R,L]
Or even better, just redirect all traffic with news.ycombinator.com or reedit.com referer (before RewriteRule):

    RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://([^/]+\.)?ycombinator\.com [OR]
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://([^/]+\.)?reddit\.com [OR]
You don't even have to manually disable caching after traffic dies down this way.

Re: Bulletproof your blog – survive the Hacker News effect

#13

Post by de90 »

nodemaker wrote: post #8
zrail wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that ironic? Thoughts have to be stored somewhere and databases happen to be really good at storing things.

It is ironic because the real deep reason we share our thoughts is because we want them to stand out! Databases are indeed good at storing millions and billions of things and they are designed for it.But no human being is individually capable of creating content that really justifies a "dynamic programming oriented query plan generation" each time someone wishes to access his thoughts! tl;dr My argument is that stati…

But for the majority of people constructing the html\css to do that is a chore\"impossible". Storing it into a database and providing a simplistic word editor to write up new things is the easiest way. Storing the information in a db just allows it to happen easily.

Re: Bulletproof your blog – survive the Hacker News effect

#14

Post by _gd3l »

The Jekyll recommendation is a great one. For quick one-off articles something like pen.io is great, as well. And GitHub Pages are just fantastic if you didn't know already :)

In my experience, MediaTemple handles traffic spikes remarkably well. Maybe not ideal for the super-techies, but running WordPress on it with a caching plugin handles traffic pretty well at the $20 / month plan. And using S3 to serve static sites is fantastic. I'm on my phone right now so it's a pain to find the specific article, but Kyle Shank uses S3 and wrote a pretty handy article at http://kyleshank.com. Check it out and try to find the article. Great read.

Re: Bulletproof your blog – survive the Hacker News effect

#16

Post by danneu »

I wasn't a big fan of the Jekyll workflow, especially when I wanted to write a simple post from another device. My solution to that, an app that wrapped Jekyll, just felt hacky.

Instead, I just made a Rails app with fifteen minutes spent dropping in Active Admin and RDiscount to render @post.body Markdown into @post.rendered_body HTML. Then, I aggressively cached pages into the static `public/` directory. I chose Rails simply because I'm using Rails for more serious apps and I wanted a casual app that I could take seriously enough to practice on.

Otherwise, I'd have as much fun building the same thing in any other Ruby framework for Ruby practice and then cache the pages into a static directory.

Isn't that what any other static site generator does?

Re: Bulletproof your blog – survive the Hacker News effect

#18

Post by marquis »

kijin wrote: post #5

It's a shame that several years after the term "slashdot effect" was coined, self-hosted personal blogs are still vulnerable to this easily preventable phenomenon. The companies that host the majority of the world's small web sites, such as BlueHost, DreamHost, and (heavens forbid) GoDaddy, have not made any innovations in this department. Most VPS's are no different. NearlyFreeSpeech.NET is really good at handling t…

Where is the financial incentive for these hosting companies to do so? Most users will never see a traffic spike that can take down your average VPS or bluehost site. It seems there is a gap in the market for self-hosted sites that have built-in structures to build upon that allow for traffic spiking.

Re: Bulletproof your blog – survive the Hacker News effect

#19

Post by jyap »

When my blog hit number 1 on Hacker News earlier this month (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3328619) it never went down. Running Jekyll on GitHub with my own domain julianyap.com.

30,000 hits in 24 hours.

I remember the "move your site off of GoDaddy" post last week going down this week which was run on Tumblr. Elsewhere Tumblr wasn't down so it depends on the resources they allocate to you. I suspect MG Seigler's blog is on a top tier Tumblr resource pool so I wouldnt recommend Tumblr unless you have constant popularity to your blog.

Re: Bulletproof your blog – survive the Hacker News effect

#20

Post by nodemaker »

zrail wrote: post #10
nodemaker wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is ironic because the real deep reason we share our thoughts is because we want them to stand out! Databases are indeed good at storing millions and billions of things and they are designed for it.But no human being is individually capable of creating content that really justifies a "dynamic programming oriented query plan generation" each time someone wishes to access his thoughts! tl;dr My argument is that stati…

Sure. My counter-argument is that for multi-tenant hosting like tumblr where millions of people keep their personal blogs, keeping posts in a database is common sense because they're a known quantity. Backup strategies, optimization techniques, operations procedures are all well known and battle tested. Also, creating content using a web-based editor that saves to a database is very easy for not-so-technical people t…

Yes sites like tumblr definitely make sense...My argument is against running your self-hosted personal blog with an SQL server! And of course...my argument is for the technical people only....perhaps someone among us can make a static content generation solution for everyone!
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