3 ms·

Just curious, is there any general number range for how much traffic a front page post might get? Less than 10k, 10-100,000, 100,000+, etc

by mym1990 4y ago

dsmmcken 4y ago
I can tell you it's more than a $5 dreamhost box can handle right now.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- wyager 4y ago
  My $3/mo vultr box can handle HN loads easily when using a fast and well-designed (namely resource-leak-free) backend (I've settled on https://github.com/yesodweb/wai https://github.com/yesodweb/wai based apps - the only thing that has worked well for me so far).
ezekg 4y ago
I've gotten on the front page more than a few times. In my experience, it usually peaks around 1.5k concurrents for a blog post. Peak was 50k total visits over a couple days, but has been much less too. Depends on the content and how interesting it is to the wider HN audience.
sbierwagen 4y ago
I front paged a couple times back in the day. In the neighborhood of thousands of pageloads and hundreds of concurrent users. Totally trivial for static HTML, but most people get into trouble with hand-rolled or poorly tuned blog frameworks that make multiple database calls on every visitor.
Swizec 4y ago
I once frontpaged with a funny article that readers also shared with others. Back when people still did that instead of taking a screenshot. 1,000,000 uniques over 3 days in ~2011. I have been trying to re-create that high ever since, lol. Going viral is one hell of a drug.
- mym1990 4y ago
  Wow thats insane! I always think this is what going viral on social media is like, although I am probably better off not having experienced that.
Syonyk 4y ago
I'll see on the order of 10k-25k hits (hard to say exactly, most of HN uses adblockers/tracker blockers and I use CloudFlare for caching) from an article on the HN frontpage. It's not that bad, and I could almost certainly serve it off my colo'd server without any trouble - bandwidth just isn't that high. But as my blog is entirely static (except for the comment threads, hosted on my Discourse forum), I just let CloudFlare serve it. I had to do some tweaks to the configs to say, "No, really, cache everything!" (it doesn't do that by default for a range of very valid reasons, none of which apply to me), but once that change went in, I'll see 98.5% or higher "served out of cache" ratios when I'm seeing a lot of traffic from HN or somewhere. I'd originally designed it to be hosted out of a Google Cloud bucket with CloudFlare (egress traffic is cheaper that way than out to the internet), but I eventually decided to host on my server, as I could then do Tor and some other stuff more easily. I've got the server anyway... One of these days, I may play with dropping analytics entirely and just passing requests through to my server, let images remain cached as that's the bulk of my bandwidth. Then I can go even more oldskool and parse my server logs for stats and referrers and such!
- Tijdreiziger 4y ago
  > Then I can go even more oldskool and parse my server logs for stats and referrers and such! Expect to see a bunch of bots. I tried setting up server-side analytics for a WordPress-based website, but I had to get rid of it as the bot traffic made it essentially useless.
wyager 4y ago
10-100k iirc. Peak requests maybe 200-500req/sec (but not sustained). I had a few posts get >250k but those were on Reddit as well.
gk1 4y ago
I just hit #1 last week and frontpaged a bunch in the past. Peaked at around 250-300 concurrent visitors, totaling around 10k in a 24-hr period, which is on par with past experience.
cube2222 4y ago
Second place for a few hours and ~1k points resulted in around 50k unique visits. If your website is a collection of static files and you're hosting them on S3+CloudFront or something similar (GitHub pages works too), then it'll work without any issues and cost pennies for the whole thing.
spaceman_2020 4y ago
Hit the front page twice with two articles in the past. Total traffic both times was around 60k over the course of 2-3 days.

Just curious, is there any general number range for how much traffic a front page post might get? Less than 10k, 10-100,000, 100,000+, etc

dsmmcken 4y ago

I can tell you it's more than a $5 dreamhost box can handle right now.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
wyager 4y ago
My $3/mo vultr box can handle HN loads easily when using a fast and well-designed (namely resource-leak-free) backend (I've settled on https://github.com/yesodweb/wai https://github.com/yesodweb/wai based apps - the only thing that has worked well for me so far).

ezekg 4y ago

I've gotten on the front page more than a few times. In my experience, it usually peaks around 1.5k concurrents for a blog post. Peak was 50k total visits over a couple days, but has been much less too. Depends on the content and how interesting it is to the wider HN audience.

sbierwagen 4y ago

I front paged a couple times back in the day. In the neighborhood of thousands of pageloads and hundreds of concurrent users. Totally trivial for static HTML, but most people get into trouble with hand-rolled or poorly tuned blog frameworks that make multiple database calls on every visitor.

Swizec 4y ago

I once frontpaged with a funny article that readers also shared with others. Back when people still did that instead of taking a screenshot. 1,000,000 uniques over 3 days in ~2011. I have been trying to re-create that high ever since, lol. Going viral is one hell of a drug.

mym1990 4y ago
Wow thats insane! I always think this is what going viral on social media is like, although I am probably better off not having experienced that.

Syonyk 4y ago

I'll see on the order of 10k-25k hits (hard to say exactly, most of HN uses adblockers/tracker blockers and I use CloudFlare for caching) from an article on the HN frontpage. It's not that bad, and I could almost certainly serve it off my colo'd server without any trouble - bandwidth just isn't that high. But as my blog is entirely static (except for the comment threads, hosted on my Discourse forum), I just let CloudFlare serve it. I had to do some tweaks to the configs to say, "No, really, cache everything!" (it doesn't do that by default for a range of very valid reasons, none of which apply to me), but once that change went in, I'll see 98.5% or higher "served out of cache" ratios when I'm seeing a lot of traffic from HN or somewhere. I'd originally designed it to be hosted out of a Google Cloud bucket with CloudFlare (egress traffic is cheaper that way than out to the internet), but I eventually decided to host on my server, as I could then do Tor and some other stuff more easily. I've got the server anyway... One of these days, I may play with dropping analytics entirely and just passing requests through to my server, let images remain cached as that's the bulk of my bandwidth. Then I can go even more oldskool and parse my server logs for stats and referrers and such!

Tijdreiziger 4y ago
> Then I can go even more oldskool and parse my server logs for stats and referrers and such! Expect to see a bunch of bots. I tried setting up server-side analytics for a WordPress-based website, but I had to get rid of it as the bot traffic made it essentially useless.

wyager 4y ago

10-100k iirc. Peak requests maybe 200-500req/sec (but not sustained). I had a few posts get >250k but those were on Reddit as well.

gk1 4y ago

I just hit #1 last week and frontpaged a bunch in the past. Peaked at around 250-300 concurrent visitors, totaling around 10k in a 24-hr period, which is on par with past experience.

cube2222 4y ago

Second place for a few hours and ~1k points resulted in around 50k unique visits. If your website is a collection of static files and you're hosting them on S3+CloudFront or something similar (GitHub pages works too), then it'll work without any issues and cost pennies for the whole thing.

spaceman_2020 4y ago

Hit the front page twice with two articles in the past. Total traffic both times was around 60k over the course of 2-3 days.