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Talk about a self-defeating message. Now I get timeouts. Things you get on BigEvilHost's platform: * SEO, discoverability * ability to handle HN hug-of-death

by libria 7y ago

Talk about a self-defeating message. Now I get timeouts. Things you get on BigEvilHost's platform: * SEO, discoverability * ability to handle HN hug-of-death * distribution * some SRE/dev-op makes sure your article isn't 404'd * backups etc. > Avoid unnecessary middlemen. They just proved why they're necessary.

maehwasu 7y ago
Everyone (or at least most people here) knows that Google has all those advantages. The issue is that we keep falling back on those advantages, rather than doing the work necessary to make owning your own platform realistic. I also laughed at the irony of OP's site going down, but these are the growing pains that will ultimately be necessary if we don't want the internet to be walled gardens run by 3-4 companies.
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  As a comment upthread mentioned, there’s no fundamental technical obstacle. Free software and commodity hardware are plenty sufficient to match any specific technical challenge at the HN front page scale. But running a web platform is a hard operational problem. Having all the pieces available doesn’t get you even halfway there; you have to spin them up and glue them together, and any number of relatively minor mistakes can mean the whole thing falls over. I’m not sure even in principle that can be reduced to a portable platform binary.
quickthrower2 7y ago
Netlify or s3 or cloudflare + learning seo covers the above points. Unless no one wants to learn stuff anymore. We need an evil corp because no one can change their oil anymore?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
gambler 7y ago
On the other hand, a big platform can arbitrarily delete your account/content with no recourse, or just shut down. Happens all the time.
kazinator 7y ago
A server in the cloud doesn't necessarily mean you're using the host company's application platform. The article is "RSS and blogs vs YouTube, Facebook, Twitter. ..." not "iron in my closet vs. rented server".
majewsky 7y ago
> ability to handle HN hug-of-death Seriously, this is bullshit. When my blog was on the frontpage, CPU load on my single 1-core VPS peaked at 5% and bandwidth usage was about 1 megabit per second. No Netlify, no Cloudflare, no nothing. If your website cannot handle the HN crowd, it's just badly engineered. Period. Source: https://xyrillian.de/thoughts/posts/latency-matters-aftermath.html https://xyrillian.de/thoughts/posts/latency-matters-aftermat...
- saurik 7y ago
  Yeah: I honestly don't understand how people build websites that can't handle Hacker News levels of traffic... this site just isn't _that_ popular in the grand scheme of things.
  - jandrese 7y ago
    The instant your website requires a database query to build the front page you're susceptible to the HN hug of death. Obviously you can build a scalable solution to handle traffic spikes, but there will always be the danger. If you're talking about an ordinary webserver giving out an ordinary webpage you will run out of bandwidth long before you overload the server.
    - _bxg1 7y ago
      Yeah; static pages like blog posts should really be cached out from templates + data, to avoid this problem.
    - weberc2 7y ago
      Depends on your database. S3 will handle the hug just fine.
    - AlchemistCamp 7y ago
      That's a bit dramatic. I've load-tested database backed sites on $5/month DO droplets and gotten > 1k requests per second for extended tests. My primary site not only stores articles in the DB, but runs them through an extended, custom markdown parser upon retrieval, and processes and reports event data on every page load. It was still successfully returning ~250 reqs/sec before I'd bothered implementing any caching or pre-compilation of markdown at all. In contrast, people recently HNed[1] are reporting about 12-15k visits over a day. That's something a single server on a $5/month VPS can handle in a minute 1) https://getpolarized.io/2019/04/02/getting-hacker-news-lessons-for-entrepreneurs.html https://getpolarized.io/2019/04/02/getting-hacker-news-lesso...
zaarn 7y ago
The HN "Hug-o-Death" can be handled by a potato unless your product is layers of bad code. No reasonable app should just die from 20MBps of traffic.
- kazinator 7y ago
  Have you considered: what if it's connected to a 10 MBps pipe? (E.g. crappy residential DSL.)
  - zaarn 7y ago
    Then the connection dies but if you get through (and any decent router should in that case just half bandwidth per connection) you get a working site, not a 404 or 500 or similar.
TheTruth54321 7y ago
F@ck off ... keep sucking BigEvilsHost d!ck ... I'll take a timed out website that has a message I'll return to read after d!cks like you have stopped clicking on it ... than some bullsh!t piece of boll@cks sitting on Facebook that you probably wrote. Have a wonderful day.

by libria 7y ago

maehwasu 7y ago

Everyone (or at least most people here) knows that Google has all those advantages. The issue is that we keep falling back on those advantages, rather than doing the work necessary to make owning your own platform realistic. I also laughed at the irony of OP's site going down, but these are the growing pains that will ultimately be necessary if we don't want the internet to be walled gardens run by 3-4 companies.

SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
As a comment upthread mentioned, there’s no fundamental technical obstacle. Free software and commodity hardware are plenty sufficient to match any specific technical challenge at the HN front page scale. But running a web platform is a hard operational problem. Having all the pieces available doesn’t get you even halfway there; you have to spin them up and glue them together, and any number of relatively minor mistakes can mean the whole thing falls over. I’m not sure even in principle that can be reduced to a portable platform binary.

quickthrower2 7y ago

Netlify or s3 or cloudflare + learning seo covers the above points. Unless no one wants to learn stuff anymore. We need an evil corp because no one can change their oil anymore?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

gambler 7y ago

On the other hand, a big platform can arbitrarily delete your account/content with no recourse, or just shut down. Happens all the time.

kazinator 7y ago

A server in the cloud doesn't necessarily mean you're using the host company's application platform. The article is "RSS and blogs vs YouTube, Facebook, Twitter. ..." not "iron in my closet vs. rented server".

majewsky 7y ago

> ability to handle HN hug-of-death Seriously, this is bullshit. When my blog was on the frontpage, CPU load on my single 1-core VPS peaked at 5% and bandwidth usage was about 1 megabit per second. No Netlify, no Cloudflare, no nothing. If your website cannot handle the HN crowd, it's just badly engineered. Period. Source: https://xyrillian.de/thoughts/posts/latency-matters-aftermath.html https://xyrillian.de/thoughts/posts/latency-matters-aftermat...

saurik 7y ago
Yeah: I honestly don't understand how people build websites that can't handle Hacker News levels of traffic... this site just isn't _that_ popular in the grand scheme of things.
- jandrese 7y ago
  The instant your website requires a database query to build the front page you're susceptible to the HN hug of death. Obviously you can build a scalable solution to handle traffic spikes, but there will always be the danger. If you're talking about an ordinary webserver giving out an ordinary webpage you will run out of bandwidth long before you overload the server.
  - _bxg1 7y ago
    Yeah; static pages like blog posts should really be cached out from templates + data, to avoid this problem.
  - weberc2 7y ago
    Depends on your database. S3 will handle the hug just fine.
  - AlchemistCamp 7y ago
    That's a bit dramatic. I've load-tested database backed sites on $5/month DO droplets and gotten > 1k requests per second for extended tests. My primary site not only stores articles in the DB, but runs them through an extended, custom markdown parser upon retrieval, and processes and reports event data on every page load. It was still successfully returning ~250 reqs/sec before I'd bothered implementing any caching or pre-compilation of markdown at all. In contrast, people recently HNed[1] are reporting about 12-15k visits over a day. That's something a single server on a $5/month VPS can handle in a minute 1) https://getpolarized.io/2019/04/02/getting-hacker-news-lessons-for-entrepreneurs.html https://getpolarized.io/2019/04/02/getting-hacker-news-lesso...

zaarn 7y ago

The HN "Hug-o-Death" can be handled by a potato unless your product is layers of bad code. No reasonable app should just die from 20MBps of traffic.

kazinator 7y ago
Have you considered: what if it's connected to a 10 MBps pipe? (E.g. crappy residential DSL.)
- zaarn 7y ago
  Then the connection dies but if you get through (and any decent router should in that case just half bandwidth per connection) you get a working site, not a 404 or 500 or similar.

TheTruth54321 7y ago

F@ck off ... keep sucking BigEvilsHost d!ck ... I'll take a timed out website that has a message I'll return to read after d!cks like you have stopped clicking on it ... than some bullsh!t piece of boll@cks sitting on Facebook that you probably wrote. Have a wonderful day.