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Bulletproof your blog – survive the Hacker News effect

maxmasnick.com

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Re: Bulletproof your blog – survive the Hacker News effect

#41

Post by iamben »

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…

I had just under 90k uniques in a 24 hour period (and 170k-ish pageviews) on NFS last month and it held up without any problems :-)

I think it cost me about 10 cents. Brilliant.

Re: Bulletproof your blog – survive the Hacker News effect

#42

Post by sunkencity »

mapleoin wrote: post #40
masnick wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, if you write something akin to Jekyll it will work fine. However, I think most people would probably be trying to learn a framework like Rails or Django if they were writing a blogging engine to learn a new language/framework.

So write your blogging engine as you normally would and then make a button which says: dump to html for each page and then figure out when you want that button to be pressed (i.e. manually or automatically). More things to learn. Yay!

Build it anyway you like but then wget --mirror before rsync to deploy.

Re: Bulletproof your blog – survive the Hacker News effect

#44

Post by mike-cardwell »

seunosewa wrote: post #33
masnick wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this is a great learning experience, it is hard to write a blog engine that will stand up to traffic spikes on the first try. If your goal is learning a new language or framework, this is a great idea. If your goal is to have a reliable, traffic-resistant blog I think it's best to stick with a tried and true platform.

It's not hard. Just write a blog engine that generates static html pages.

Or use caching. My webpages are generated using FastCGI and served by Nginx. So I configured Nginx's FastCGI module to internally cache GET requests for 1 minute.

Re: Bulletproof your blog – survive the Hacker News effect

#46

Post by jaequery »

i'm sorry but this author has failed to point out the most commong cause for why a site goes down. it's not because of failing to cache...etc...most dbs will cache for you anyway... the main reason is because you probably are on apache and serving static assets directly w/o hosting them off a CDN or nginx/litespeed. if your page had 150 images/js/css combined, that's 150 hits hitting your server per page load. now multiply that by 100's or 1,000's+ visitors HN brings to your site at any given moment, ofcourse it will go down. apache isn't really good at serving static files, just relieving static assets off to cdn/fileserver is huge.

Re: Bulletproof your blog – survive the Hacker News effect

#47

Post by edanm »

marquis wrote: post #18
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.

Isn't the gap filled by companies like Posterous/Tumbler? For the average user, they answer the problem of "put something online and make sure it stays there" perfectly well.
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