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Comcast Decided To Shut Down SearchYC
- yid 15y agoUm...why was it being hosted off Comcast, instead of Linode (for example)?
- mmx 15y agoAs a user of Comcast Business Class for some hosting, it's more about what's available near you. I host some of servers in my garage, I like to manage them manually and Comcast is the only option in my area, I pay $110 for 10down & 2.5up, but some locations they have 100mb connections for that same price. What I'd like to know is why Comcast shut it down so I can either avoid this happening to me or drop comcast for a datacenter 110 miles away. Its difficult hosting a site at my current bandwidth anyways.
- anigbrowl 15y agoI'm sorry I suggested you hadn't paid your bill. There was so little information in the page that it sounded like an attempt to avoid embarrassment. Get something in writing, and get more info up there. Best of luck.
- bad_user 15y agoWhy manage servers manually? I mean I get it, you want control, but for simple web apps?
- breck 15y agoI used to host sites out of my closet for fun. I had a monitor that had tail running on my server log. There was something really cool about seeing hits, knowing that someone in another part of the world requested a file and it was sent from the hard drive in this very closet.
- nakkiel 15y agoGet a VPS and you'll actually save a few bucks (no hardware, cheaper Comcast subscription). Run tail in screen. I think there's a Nodejs app on github that let you see in real time who's accessing your box and from where (it's an interactive map thing with websockets).
- chopsueyar 15y ago$$$ Even an old Pentium 4 w/ a couple gigs of RAM is probably all he needs.
- bad_user 15y agoThat's bollocks, as a good Internet line costs an arm and a leg and you're far better off renting a VPS. A micro-instance on EC2 for moderate traffic does wonders if properly optimized (i.e. Nginx, async behavior, CloudFront) and is costing me something like 15 USD per month (the total bill, which includes EBS, S3 and CF), which is cheaper than my home broadband line which is totally unusable for any kind of traffic (because it is ADSL, download is good but uploading sucks). I also moved my private Git repositories on it, from Github and I'm probably going to end my subscription with them. It is also configured as an email server with which I spammed my old high-school colleagues before our 10-years reunion :-)
- chopsueyar 15y agoNot sure if you read the article, but he has a Comcast connection. Why pay extra, if what you have already works? Comcast business class w/ a fixed-ip (I have set up several to stream 720p HD surveillance cameras), has upload tiers in 2Mbps, 5Mbps, and 10Mbps...and it starts at $60/month. All he is serving is text, no images, video, or audio. Verizon Fios has 5Mbps, 25Mbps, and 35Mbps upload tiers. A Fios 35Mbps up and down connection is $125/mo. Not bad for UNLIMITED bandwidth. Anecdotal evidence: http://seesarasotalive.com/sarasota-webcams http://seesarasotalive.com/sarasota-webcams - moved from rackspace to Fios
- prpon 15y agoMore than likely it is because of the bandwidth usage. It is really easy to host it using ec2 or rackspace but the bandwidth costs are gonna kill you if you are scraping HN. How often do you get data from HN?
- anigbrowl 15y agoWell, that wasn't very informative. I suspect an unpaid bill or similar, to be honest.
- kapitalx 15y agoJust guessing, but they might have been hosting off a comcast highspeed line which Comcast forbids on its residential service.
- NathanKP 15y agoYeah, that was my first thought as well. Comcast (at least in my area) is primarily a provider of internet service to homes, not a server hosting company, so if Comcast was able to shut SearchYC down then that means it must have been hosted from a home internet connection.
- derobert 15y agoComcast does business connections as well. This isn't hard to find: for example, if you visit comcast.com, its under "products". Comcast does all sorts of business Internet connections including web hosting. I suspect they do in your area too, but you've probably never noticed (where do small businesses in your area get Internet access from?). Their cable business connections are delivered over similar (or maybe the same) infrastructure as the residential ones.
- drzaiusapelord 15y agoI use Comcast business at my workplace. I get a pretty good deal, actually an amazing deal compared to fiber with a zero install cost. 22/5 for around $150 or so. Their business support is competent. Residential service is around $60 here. So for about double that you can get a 22/5 line without caps.
- zackattack 15y agoWePay needs to transform into something that say, Linode can offer as a payment option.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- thethimble 15y agoWhy doesn't HN have native search?
- iamwil 15y agocuz pg doesn't need to work on it, when lots of us do.
- stevenj 15y agoI may be wrong about this, but I thought I heard PG say that a YC company was working on a solution.
- dcosson 15y agoI'm sure there are multiple alternative solutions, but hnsearch.com is a pretty good one. Written by the Octopart guys and runs off of ThriftDB, the search and database backend that they wrote for their site.
- nandemo 15y agoBasically pg doesn't think it's important and doesn't want to do it. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1329334 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1329334
- cincinnatus 15y agoHe replied not only that isn't important but also implied that there is some big data issue here. Which is incorrect. There are multiple open-source solutions for this 'problem' as many people on here could attest (not to mention configure). Obviously if it can be done over the wire it could be done even better (cheaper/faster) local to the server.
- g123g 15y agoHopfully you will be able to bring it back soon. SearchYC.com is the best way to search the treasure trove that HN has become.
- tonyskn 15y agoThe awesome Chrome extension Hacker News Sidebar, which uses searchyc.com, is down too. Are there any alternative extensions or bookmarklets for automatically linking a page to its HN comment thread?
- bkrausz 15y agoWhat kind of traffic does SearchYC get? Is a $40/mo Linode not sufficient? I would gladly pay that (or be content with some Google ads in the right bar). Hell, I'd even maintain the site...it's a great service.
- ssamuli 15y agoAfter searchyc went down, I've just used google, adding "site:news.ycombinator.com" after my query. Seems to return quite good results too.
- hollerith 15y agoSearchyc will arrange the results of a search in chronological order, which I find very useful since the date I saw the post is one of the most reliable pieces of information I will typically have on the post.
- jrussbowman 15y agoIt's a shame Blekko doesn't seem to crawl news.ycombinator.com much, you could get that information with site:news.ycombinator.com /date [ query ] if they did
- greglindahl 15y agoI'm afraid that blekko's livecrawl coverage of news.ycombinator.com isn't very good. I'll add that host to our QA suite.
- joshfinnie 15y agoIt is funny that this feature has yet to hit google. I am wanting more and more the ability to sort my google results in chronological order. I recently got a iMac and would love to see the most resent article on how to do things and not ones from 2008!
- jamesbritt 15y agoYou can add a date range filter to your searches and limit the results to, say, the past year.
- sireat 15y agoUnfortunately, that date range filter is pretty limited, i think there are 5 options, year, month, week and so on. Better would be an option to specify range.
- iheartmemcache 15y agoThis service is a major component of this community; as such, I'll host this on whatever metal you need. My contact information is in my profile. Ping me on G-talk and we can have this sorted out by the morning (if you're in PST).
- shrike 15y agoI've got plenty of Linode, prgmr and EC2 cycles to spare, you are welcome to any/all of them. My contact info is in my profile, please get in touch if I can help.
- iamwil 15y agoI use hnsearch.com, powered by beta backend magic by the Octopart guys. I find it to be quite fast and quite good.
- meiji 15y agoLike lots of others, I can help with hosting (work at a big hoster). Ping me a message if I can assist
- mbesto 15y agoJust curious - anyone know why?
- swombat 15y agoWhat's wrong with http://www.hnsearch.com http://www.hnsearch.com ?
- evangineer 15y agoJust got zero hits on a search that I know there is at least one result for. Same search worked fine on searchyc.com a few days ago. EDIT: Google search using site:news.ycombinator.com just now delivered the result I was expecting.
- smock 15y agoWhat is the search you are conducting?
- evangineer 15y agoI was searching for SML on Stilts
- andres 15y agoI'm getting a hit for "SML on Stilts" from 5 months ago: http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=SML+on+Stilts http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=SML+on+Stil... Did you get different results? Were you expecting another submission?
- evangineer 15y agoWhen I did my search, I got zero hits, which surprised me.
- danielnicollet 15y agoyep or http://searchhackernews.com/ http://searchhackernews.com/
- synnik 15y agoThis has always bugged me - as owner of a product, YOU are ultimately responsible for its availability. If you chose a bad service provider, sure, you'll have outages. But accept accountability, say you are working on it, and fix it.
- scott_s 15y agoThis has always bugged me - the sense of entitlement people have when a free service experiences an outage. The people behind SearchYC are doing us a favor. They should be thanked, not reprimanded. So, uh, thanks. I've used SearchYC many-a-times.
- synnik 15y agoYou misunderstand. I don't care whether or not there is an outage. I care that people are professional in their work. Passing the buck is unprofessional. Accepting the responsibility is what matters, and if they decide not to fix it, then say so and own that choice. Service providers are responsible for their service only. Not the products you layer on top of them. Doing free favors doesn't mean you should drop your level of professionalism.
- scott_s 15y agoIt's a service among friends. I actually expect them to act a bit more casual. Given than, I think what they said was just fine: Comcast turned off their service, they're looking into alternatives.
- tommi 15y ago> I care that people are professional in their work. I feel the same way. But this isn't work, this is play.
- awj 15y agoSo it's ok for me to misrepresent a situation and make other people look bad as long as I'm "just playing"?
- smackfu 15y agoYet another outage message that says nothing. Is it really that hard to write a few more sentences, maybe quote the Comcast reason for shutting it down? Were they running the server on a residential line or something? Using too much upstream bandwidth? This is a search engine for a technical community, we can handle it.
- phillijw 15y agoPut a donation link on the page to help pay for servers. Show how much has been donated and/or how close you are to your monthly payment.
- nicksergeant 15y agoNever knew this existed. Using "site:news.ycombinator.com" in Google works perfectly fine for me.