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When 70M people visit your joke site
- BlueTemplar 5y agoFollowup : Please Leave My Ship Alone : What happens when 70M people visit the article you made about 70M people visiting your joke site?
- walrus01 5y ago> The hosting company I was working with said at its peak 7,500 people were coming per second. Just ridiculous. There were two peaks — when people first heard about it and then when it was getting unstuck. There were at least 3 million people during the unstuck period. I got told by hosting company that the site got 70 million hits in total. I’m still getting between 1,000 and 2,000 people a day, even now. I wonder what this would look like on a day and week scale network traffic graph, in Mbps
- Tenoke 5y agoI'm guessing a site like that is on the order of 1mb per visit so my guess would be within an order of magnitude of 100 TB total, 7.5gb/s at peak. Depends a lot on caching etc of course.
- tomjohnneill 5y agoIt was a static site cached on Vercel. Not including the map (which is an iframe) the site was less than 100kb.
- CodesInChaos 5y agoThe page appears to have 265kB first party content. 265kB * 7500/s = 2GB/s = 16Gbit/s
- mimac 5y agoI use the site to get to the ship tracking site as it's easier to remember. Also learned there is live ship tracking info available! Fascinating!
- iforgotpassword 5y agoI like that he's honest about getting obsessed by it, and feeling down after the attention was gone. He could've easily played it down claiming it was just for shits and giggles and didn't mean anything. "I'll never make anything again in my life that reaches 70M people" must take a while to sink in.
- IIAOPSW 5y agoI guess he has come to accept that ship has sailed.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- simonbarker87 5y agoWell done, bravo! how does it feel to know you’ve made the best and most well timed joke you’ll ever make?
- extrememacaroni 5y agoAh yes, yours must be the snarkiest reply ever given.
- tuwtuwtuwtuw 5y agoI interpreted it as a reference to the feelings of OP. Don't think it was intended as snarky? Maybe my snark detector is broken, English is secondary language for me.
- outime 5y agoI also understood it that way but I can understand how some folks may get it the other way.
- cyberlab 5y ago> "I'll never make anything again in my life that reaches 70M people" must take a while to sink in. There's people that have turned single serving sites[0] into a sport and probably enjoy even wilder success than the stuck ship site. There's a tonne of sites like this here: https://www.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/ https://www.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/ It's not hard to get something going viral anyway. Just make the topic related to something recent in the news, cobble together some basic HTML, purchase a domain, then get 'influencer' type accounts on Twitter to retweet your link and ask a few journos to write an article about it and you're off. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-serving_site https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-serving_site
- donalhunt 5y agoTechnically it's still stuck (in Egypt) until the owners pay the fine / settle.
- krychu 5y agoTechnically, we’re all stuck in the solar system.
- lukeramsden 5y agoOn the bright side if there is ever a large ship-getting-stuck-event he's already in position. Maybe the next one could be a spaceship.
- polote 5y agorelated https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26645813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26645813 | Inside a viral website
- gennarro 5y agoYes the articles were quite similar! I thought I had read this new one already, but site author had just done his own article first.
- sumedh 5y agoWhat kind of hosting are we talking here. Can a $5 VPS box handle this much traffic?
- arlk 5y agoYou don't even need a VPS. A static website with no user input better be hosted on Vercel or Netlify, with Cloudflare as a CDN.
- sofixa 5y agoNo need for Cloudflare, Vercel or Netlify already have CDNs. Another option is Cloudflare themselves, with Cloudflare Pages. There's also Firebase, and good old S3+Cloudfront.
- travisjungroth 5y agoI just launched something with AWS Amplify, which is automatic S3+Cloudfront. Insanely easy. Just link a repo.
- 0goel0 5y agoHow much would it cost, assuming 70m visitors and various page sizes (100k to 1m)?
- travisjungroth 5y agoOh, actually a shitload. Data out is $0.15 per GB. 70m at 1mb is $10k. Straight S3 is $80, if I used the calculator right.
- sofixa 5y agoVercel, Netlify and Cloudflare Pages are the same, just link a repo
- icemelt8 5y agoAWS Amplify is an abomination and should never be used.
- fouc 5y agoIt would be cool if he tracks Ever Given for the rest of its natural life.
- LordOfWolves 5y agoI'd love to learn about the financials. How much did everything cost? Was it worth it?* How does one reason with the expenditure? *I do understand that Tom Neill created this while bored at home. I also understand that if created via modern methods, this project could have cost him next to nothing, and thus only benefits awaited him. I'd love to learn more.
- tomjohnneill 5y agoI wrote that up here: https://notfunatparties.substack.com/p/inside-a-viral-website https://notfunatparties.substack.com/p/inside-a-viral-websit...
- macintux 5y agoJust wanted to say thanks: you did indeed break the news for me, anyway, despite my near-obsession with monitoring Twitter that week.
- LordOfWolves 5y agoThanks Tom, nothing better than hearing directly from you regarding this.
- paulpauper 5y agotoo bad elon musk or someone else who is famous didn't make a big donation or bid for the NFT.
- ttty 5y agoThe ship became stuck in the middle of the English Channel on Sunday afternoon. The ship was re-stuck for hours, drawing millions of viewers to the site to watch a live stream of the event. That's it.
- samus 5y agoAre you running a bot? In other threads, your comments seem to be summaries of TA.
- amelius 5y agoCurious that he used "www.istheshipstillstuck.com" as the domain name, and "Is that ship still stuck?" for the title of the page ("the" versus "that"). And interestingly, there is a completely different website at: https://www.isthatshipstillstuck.com/ https://www.isthatshipstillstuck.com/
- dmos62 5y agoWhen you say the address and the title one after the other it kind of sounds better when there's a small difference.
- tomjohnneill 5y agoIt was basically a typo, but then enough people got slightly irritated by it that I started to enjoy having it that way.
- andygcook 5y agoHere’s a link to the original makers own account of running the site: https://notfunatparties.substack.com/p/inside-a-viral-website https://notfunatparties.substack.com/p/inside-a-viral-websit...
- chubot 5y agoDiscussed a couple weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26645813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26645813
- distantsounds 5y ago"I checked the server logs and saw the traffic and was like, ‘holy shit. this might cost me a lot of money to run this thing.’" excuse me? running a (mostly) static site that just makes API calls to third parties is costing you lots of money? i swear, everyone's obsession with running things on per-instance resources that charge fractions of a cent that add up astronomically. run this on a $5/mo VPS in ovhcloud and save yourself the headache.
- domano 5y ago70M visitors is a lot of traffic, no matter how you host it. Assuming we are talking about 1MB per visit then that is roughly 70TB. At least my VPS in germany does have a traffic limit. Also he did statically host it on vercel if i remember correctly.
- progval 5y ago> Assuming we are talking about 1MB per visit then that is roughly 70TB. If you visit the site today with scripts blocked, the site still works and the page is only 160kB, including 140kB of images of book covers. And the "I checked the server logs and saw the traffic" part of the story happened before they added these ads (see https://notfunatparties.substack.com/p/inside-a-viral-website https://notfunatparties.substack.com/p/inside-a-viral-websit... for a better timeline)
- ZWoz 5y agoIf you have hobby site, then failing action "going dark" is better than "going cost 1000 times more".
- domano 5y agoThat is true, mostly i think that the initial commenter underestimated the costs, but it seems that i myself have overestimated them.
- tomjohnneill 5y agoYeah it was statically hosted in the end (initially it wasn't quite static). When it was at its most popular, the total site size including JavaScript was around 70kb as far as I can remember, so it didn't come anywhere near as high as 70TB.
- krychu 5y agoI thought his honesty was heartwarming, and also the ability to accurately retrospect on his emotions.
- sunsipples 5y agosell it as an nft. nft is 2020/21's monorail.
- sebdufbeau 5y agoThey did: https://opensea.io/assets/0x495f947276749ce646f68ac8c248420045cb7b5e/39548461347666529560377967944030380563003576059826604202233011364559964864513 https://opensea.io/assets/0x495f947276749ce646f68ac8c2484200...
- sunsipples 5y agothere will come a day when i think read more before commenting. today was not that day. sorry
- NDizzle 5y agoGood work. Reminds me of one of my old favorites, http://iscaliforniaonfire.com/ http://iscaliforniaonfire.com/
- bckr 5y agoHmm, seems it hasn't been updated because California is not on fire right now.
- goatsi 5y agoWith a state as large as California, some part of it is almost always on fire: https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents/2021/4/5/springs-fire/ https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents/2021/4/5/springs-fire/
- gewoonkris 5y agoOr this one from when the LHC came online: http://www.hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/ http://www.hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com...
- LeoPanthera 5y agoI was always annoyed that it didn't show where California was on fire, but then I discovered this. http://whereiscaliforniaonfire.com http://whereiscaliforniaonfire.com
- jb775 5y agoWhat he able to monetize the site at all? Didn't see anything in the article besides him posting a few links that increased certain book sales. If he managed to get a penny for each viewer, he would have made $700k. If not, I'm curious how anyone would best leverage a temporary & massive surge of eyeballs for the highest monetization?
- scubazealous 5y agoI think its really cool they left a badge at the bottom of the site to show regular visitors the traffic through an analytics site. https://simpleanalytics.com/istheshipstillstuck.com?utm_source=istheshipstillstuck.com&utm_content=badge https://simpleanalytics.com/istheshipstillstuck.com?utm_sour...
- ChrisArchitect 5y agonot adding anything new to the story really -- plenty of discussion and info in the post from the original guy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26645813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26645813