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The main takeaway for me is that dedicated hardware is a nightmare when you have large traffic spikes. You could save a ton of stress by running this on a cloud

The main takeaway for me is that dedicated hardware is a nightmare when you have large traffic spikes. You could save a ton of stress by running this on a cloud platform with autoscaling, such as AWS or Heroku. You can always spin up a reserved instances on a long-term contract when you hit a certain baseline level of demand. And you should never consider dedicated servers or colocating until you hit that point. AWS or Heroku could have easily handled the "freemium" traffic that would have crushed these servers, instead of only accepting paid users. And it sounds like that might have been a far more lucrative opportunity.

pjc50 10y ago
If your app is designed to autoscale, and you're prepared to have Amazon charge you an arbitrary amount for the privilege, and your cashflow through the payments processor is faster than you have to pay AWS. (How do people scale cloud DBs? Presumably you can't just keep increasing the write speed into a single DB?)
- luckystartup 10y ago
  Autoscaling is free to set up on AWS [1]. All web server code should be able to scale, and there's nothing special about autoscaling. The easiest (and default) way is to just spin up servers based on CPU usage. For Heroku, you can use a third-party service that costs $10 per month [2]. If you use Amazon RDS, it's pretty easy to scale your database both vertically and horizontally [3]. If you can use Amazon DynamoDB [4], scaling is something you will never, ever have to worry about. Not even when you have millions of daily users. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/ https://aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/ [2] https://www.hirefire.io/ https://www.hirefire.io/ [3] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/scaling-your-amazon-rds-instance-vertically-and-horizontally/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/scaling-your-amazon-rd... [4] https://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/ https://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/
  - chousuke 10y ago
    Eh, you "never, ever" have to worry about DynamoDB scaling in a perfect world where marketing is literally true. If you read Amazon's documentation, there's quite a lot that you need to pay attention to if you want DynamoDB to actually perform and scale well for your application. You don't get scalability for free. Tradeoffs and effort are always required. In Amazon's case you can usually throw money at the problem, but even that has its limits.
siavosh 10y ago
But his #1 bottleneck was a poorly indexed tags table. I would imagine most people don't setup auto-scaling distributed databases for relatively simple site like this. His bottlenecks weren't application logic or static content servers that I imagine are more trivially to autoscale with a cloud service.

pjc50 10y ago

If your app is designed to autoscale, and you're prepared to have Amazon charge you an arbitrary amount for the privilege, and your cashflow through the payments processor is faster than you have to pay AWS. (How do people scale cloud DBs? Presumably you can't just keep increasing the write speed into a single DB?)

luckystartup 10y ago
Autoscaling is free to set up on AWS [1]. All web server code should be able to scale, and there's nothing special about autoscaling. The easiest (and default) way is to just spin up servers based on CPU usage. For Heroku, you can use a third-party service that costs $10 per month [2]. If you use Amazon RDS, it's pretty easy to scale your database both vertically and horizontally [3]. If you can use Amazon DynamoDB [4], scaling is something you will never, ever have to worry about. Not even when you have millions of daily users. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/ https://aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/ [2] https://www.hirefire.io/ https://www.hirefire.io/ [3] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/scaling-your-amazon-rds-instance-vertically-and-horizontally/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/scaling-your-amazon-rd... [4] https://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/ https://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/
- chousuke 10y ago
  Eh, you "never, ever" have to worry about DynamoDB scaling in a perfect world where marketing is literally true. If you read Amazon's documentation, there's quite a lot that you need to pay attention to if you want DynamoDB to actually perform and scale well for your application. You don't get scalability for free. Tradeoffs and effort are always required. In Amazon's case you can usually throw money at the problem, but even that has its limits.

siavosh 10y ago

But his #1 bottleneck was a poorly indexed tags table. I would imagine most people don't setup auto-scaling distributed databases for relatively simple site like this. His bottlenecks weren't application logic or static content servers that I imagine are more trivially to autoscale with a cloud service.