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

Two hundred twenty thousand. In two hours.

No offense, but putting it on HN in the middle of traffic spike pressures would not help things. ;)

I was able to sign up and see just enough to get a feel before the site became unresponsive. I like that it's dead simple. I can also see how it's incredibly viral as it asks you to ask others to describe you -- very smart. At first glance it looks to me like something that could enjoy tons of traffic, but which would probably be short-lived. The challenge would be finding a way to have that traffic stick around...

I view this as a bit of a long shot, but I would do a few things. First, you've got to have the site handle the traffic. No advice on how, but find a way to get that done. Next, I would try to become known as the place to get a quick summary on anybody -- even celebrities. I imagine people will receive multiple adjectives from different people, but I'd have the site tally the three most popular and promote those as best describing of the user. :) I see a couple of possible pages for "viewer stickiness". The homepage could feature very popular users. Imagine showing the three most submitted words to describe /paulg or /marrington and other users with large responses... Next, on each user's page it could show their "friends" and the words that describe them. The site also provides the most recently submitted three words on the user's page. This might at least make each user curious about checking back at their own profile to see how people were labeling them. As for monetizing, that's probably with ads, as usual, but you have to be careful about when and where to put them. Like I said, probably a long shot, but who knows? Good luck!

I am not sure how long it is going to last. i mean you will run out of friends to write about, Isn't it?

Rather than get another Linode, for the very short term, I'd just crank the current Linode as big as they go (I assume Linode has super-quick resizing) and tell passenger to run a bunch more processes.

FYI: Heroku is fantastic for scaling apps. But if it's your database that's the bottleneck...you've got problems. Because your options with SQL are scaling up or sharding, each quite painful. If you want any advice, ping me.