> always online? It depends on what you mean by "online" and the service level : - "online" meaning a HN server responds with something. In this more literal

> always online? It depends on what you mean by "online" and the service level : - "online" meaning a HN server responds with something. In this more literal sense, HN always seems to be up. - "online" meaning normal page load response times. In this sense, HN sometimes times out with "sorry we can't serve your request right now". That seems to happen once a week or once a month. Another example is a super popular thread (e.g. "Trump wins election") that hammers the server and threads take a minute or more to load. This prompts dang to write a comment in the thread asking people to "log out" if they're not posting. This reduces load on the server as rendering pages of signed-out users don't need to query individual user stats, voting counts, hidden comments, etc. This would be a form of adhoc community behavior cooperating to reduce workload on the server rather than spin up extra instances on AWS. The occasional disruptions to the 2nd meaning of "online" is ok since this is a discussion forum and nobody's revenue is dependent on it. Therefore, it doesn't "need" more uptime than it already has.