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

Post by steveklabnik » Thu, Dec 30, 2010, 2:30 PM UTC

latch wrote: post #42

kabuks wrote: post #14

Your site seems to be down. Think about moving the code over to Heroku now, and keep scaling to meet demand. If you don't have the cash, email me and I'll front you what you need to keep it up until you figure out how you want to roll with this. This is not a time to trip over pennies. Congratulations.

Might not be a time to trip over pennies, but there's also no reason to rush into things. Heroku has always seemed to be horribly overpriced as a scaling solution. A more traditional approach of 1 web and 1 db server (possibly even physical boxes) might end up providing better value and give him enough time to figure out how to scale this horizontally on EC2 (the web part should be easy...remove any in memory state d…

Post by steveklabnik » Thu, Dec 30, 2010, 2:34 PM UTC

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.

Post by dotcoma » Thu, Dec 30, 2010, 2:45 PM UTC

steveklabnik wrote: post #133

dotcoma wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just to let you know why I've downvoted you twice: Twitter has millions in revenue a year.

Post by steveklabnik » Thu, Dec 30, 2010, 2:59 PM UTC

dotcoma wrote: post #135

steveklabnik wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to let you know why I've downvoted you twice: Twitter has millions in revenue a year.

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?

Post by dotcoma » Thu, Dec 30, 2010, 3:08 PM UTC

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.