10 ms·
Hacker News moved off AWS again at 10:17 PM PST
previously AWS IP 50.112.136.166, now M5 hosting IP 209.216.230.240
Glad to see it back on bare metal. Thanks HN team for all the hard work!
(Yes, I set up monitoring for it haha)
- Amfy 4y agomind sharing how much traffic (TB or Mbit/s) this site does?
- TylerE 4y agoI’d bet it’s a lot less than you might think. Text compresses really well even with a simple method like deflate.
- rozenmd 4y agoWithout downtime too[0], nice! [0]: https://hackernews.onlineornot.com/ https://hackernews.onlineornot.com/
- slowmotiony 4y agoI saw that it was in read only mode for a while. Couldn't have been more than a couple of minutes though.
- spullara 4y agoDon't know if this is tongue in cheek or not but I get messages that say they can't serve requests all the time. Service might not be entirely down but it definitely isn't serving all traffic more often than that.
- rozenmd 4y agoIt's a best effort approximation - this status page is automated via external uptime monitoring. It won't catch a 1 in 10000 5xx error, but it'll catch the whole site being unavailable for several minutes.
- verdverm 4y agoThere have been several occasions recently where it is in read only mode.
- didip 4y agoWhy? Running HN can’t be that expensive, no?
- Amfy 4y agoi think (hope) they take pride in hosting this off any of the big clouds.
- kortilla 4y agoRunning on AWS is stupid if you have predictable traffic patterns and don’t need massive scale at the click of a button. It’s like renting an office in downtown Manhattan that you only use to receive mail.
- rozenmd 4y agoThis - serverless bills are astronomical for consistent traffic, even EC2 charges a premium over regular hosting.
- anovikov 4y ago"Premium" is a gross understatement. Depending on traffic pattern and whether app is traffic-heavy or CPU-heavy, it can be from 5x to over 100x more expensive.
- GekkePrutser 4y agoIronically this is exactly how we use AWS at work. Some exec decided we must be modern and all cloud. So they closed our datacenters and moved everything to AWS as-is. Including the process to request new "servers" with 10 tabs of complex Excel forms. They just replaced the rack location tab with one about AWS regions lol. It's as static as it can be. We even have the old lead-time for hardware emulated in the cloud now because of the complex approval process taking up similar time. When you take the agile and auto scaling out of the cloud you just end up paying more. But I'm done telling them they're holding it wrong... Nobody wants to know. I hope being modern was worth it. /s
- zxwrt 4y agoLooking forward to ipv6!
- tambre 4y agoIt's on their list fortunately. Until then you can derive and use the IPv6 address for their old Cloudflare endpoint. I pinged them to update the backend IP for it after the outage switched to a new server. Might need to do that again now.
- zxwrt 4y ago> It's on their list fortunately. Do you know why they fail to implement ipv6 for years? I mean it's shame when tech-oriented website/service can't keep up with new technologies. > Until then you can derive and use the IPv6 address for their old Cloudflare endpoint. Would be cool if you could share more information how to do that.
- uo21tp5hoyg 4y agoI've always assumed it has something to do with HN being written in its own programming language.
- epicTaters 4y agoSo it's written in Lisp, am I right?
- joveian 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_programming_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_programming_language
- tambre 4y ago> Do you know why they fail to implement ipv6 for years? Little motivation to make changes and their anti-spam systems only handle IPv4. > Would be cool if you could share more information how to do that. Put the bytes of the IPv4 Cloudflare endpoint at the end of a Cloudflare IPv6 Anycast prefix and voila. Fastly is similar but you take the bytes containing the site ID in the IPv4 address. Also seems they didn't forget to update Cloudflare this time around. :) HN Cloudflare IPv4: 104.16.104.110 HN Cloudflare IPv6: 2606:4700::6810:686e
- zuhayeer 4y agoWould love to see the general user traffic patterns for HN
- shafyy 4y agoYes, would be cool if they used something like Plausible (or fugu.lol, shameless plug, sorry) and included a public link to their stats in the footer.
- paradite 4y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16633521 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16633521
- Confiks 4y agoRelated: The Best Time to Post on Hacker News (2019) [1] [1] https://blog.rmotr.com/the-best-time-to-post-on-hacker-news-2935118cb3d6 https://blog.rmotr.com/the-best-time-to-post-on-hacker-news-...
- nixcraft 4y agoNothing is wrong with hosting on bare metal. However, this site doesn't host images or videos, tracking for Internet ads, etc. Instead, it is a text-driven old-school site (I believe hosted on FreeBSD). Must be light on resources. It is super fast. I am sure they have some caching in place too. HN's business model is different from typical websites. They are part of YC, which is how it can sustain itself.
- abudabi123 4y agoCould HN's value be measured in dollars per eighty column character line of text and the sourceware to presentation stack likewise? I've seen numbers floated in the range $1000 to $400 per line for mixed critical sourceware platform such as seL4 microkernel.
- gigatexal 4y agoStill running FreeBSD? (Switching hosting likely didn’t warrant changes OSes, just curious).
- dang 4y agoYes.
- GekkePrutser 4y agoWow nice, I had no idea
- systemvoltage 4y agoWe should lobby HN admins to disclose 1) traffic patterns 2) hardware information and specs 3) database size or caching arch Would be cool to know how this thing is run.
- Amfy 4y agothey previously did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076041 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076041 but i would also like to know how much traffic in terms of traffic volume (TB and Mbit/s peak) they do.
- terramex 4y ago@dang posts it from time to time, I think this is most recent one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28479595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28479595 Last month HN had issues with SSD's suddenly dying after 40000 hours and moved to AWS temporarily: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32031639 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32031639
- Shakahs 4y agoWhy does HN run such a low resource site on a single bare metal server (plus identical backup) in the first place? 2x E5-2637 v4 is not that much CPU power these days. An IaaS VM from the same vendor (M5 Hosting) would provide equivalent resources with much higher reliability. What benefit is 2 bare metal servers providing over a single properly sized VM in a managed resource pool with SAN backed storage? I don't think it saves any money, and when those bare metal servers suffered identical hardware failures from a firmware bug HN was down for most of a day and temporarily migrated to an IaaS provider anyway (AWS).
- trasz 4y ago>much higher reliability [citation needed]. Sure, it solves some reliability problems, but introduces others, and I’m not sure if it’s a net win.
- voxadam 4y agoI wonder if HN's single threaded nature has anything to do with it. Eight cores or 16 threads don't do much good when your bespoke Arc Lisp stack is single core limited.
- JohnHaugeland 4y agoI kind of wonder if it's somehow not thread safe, or not talking to a database; or if not, why they don't just run parallel copies
- faangiq 4y agoWould love to see a blog post on this topic from HN.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]