Is Your Site Hacker News Ready?

Good tips for Wordpress users. Another great option we went for is hosting your entire site/blog on S3/cloudfront. This can be done using tools like Jekyll (https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll) or Middleman (http://middlemanapp.com/).

I'm constantly amazed at how poorly Wordpress is able to perform. 2.5GB virtual server with a cache in front of it and it went down?

My blog is a Django app running on a 512MB Rackspace VM with a basic Apache, mod_wsgi, and Postgres setup. I have a dozen low traffic applications all running on the same server alongside it. I have zero caching set up so every hit is doing the full process of querying the database and pushing the results out through a template.

I was on the front page of HN last year and the server load was negligable. I have graphs: http://thraxil.org/users/anders/posts/2012/06/02/How-Django-...

I bet if you switched to nginx, your server would use even less resources to handle the same amount of traffic.

We recently launched a simple website monitoring app for the iPhone where we ping sites from our servers, and send push notifications when we detect something is wrong (a poor man's pagerduty or pingdom where you do everything from your phone and can subscribe using IAP).

Probably the biggest lesson we've learned from collecting data on latency and timeouts from our backend is that there are a LOT of very poor hosts out there. Trying to strike a balance between intermittent failures, and actual "Your site is down, you need to do something" is pretty difficult, unless you are willing to simply wait long enough. We'll regularly see timeouts from places like Tumblr and Github Pages--they never go down, but things can get spotty. We can also tell when certain hosting providers are doing their weekly backups (or something - just guessing) because things will just go to pot at the same time every weekend for about an hour.

I can second the S3/CloudFront recommendation. Pretty rock solid (modulo downtime in specific regions).

For anyone curious about the app: http://vigil-app.com

My blog (elweb.co) has been on the HN home page a few times. I use Wordpress with WP Super Cache, hosted on cheapest available shared plan from Dreamhost with no problems.