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Every time I see someone announce a new startup on HN, and they can't keep a blog online through a little spurt of traffic, it makes me think very poorly of the

Every time I see someone announce a new startup on HN, and they can't keep a blog online through a little spurt of traffic, it makes me think very poorly of their business. That if they can't configure a web server to not fall over, they can't program a stable, secure app either. My own experience is that even the smallest Linode VPS, with an out-of-the-box WordPress install, serving a blog live from the database without a cache plugin, can handle all the traffic HN throws at even a #1 story on a work day afternoon. All it takes is setting the Apache config such that it won't spawn more processes than there's memory available, or using something lighter weight than Apache in the first place. I know this is a foolish connection to make, that their ability to keep a blog online isn't connected to the things that will actually determine whether the business succeeds or fails, but I can't avoid thinking it nonetheless. To turn this rant into something possibly useful, maybe some advice: it's important to figure out the basics of setting up a web server, not because it's a terrible thing for your blog to go down, but because you're losing out on all the prospective users/customers that come with being linked to and discussed on HN or other sites. Even if they can read a cached blog post, you're probably less likely to get them to go visit the startup you're blogging about during this short moment you have their attention.

hahla 14y ago
I agree this is also one of the first things that I thought about as soon as I tried to visit the site. Handling reddit and hackernews front page traffic these days should not be that big for an issue for blogs. One reason this may occur would be that they are on a very cheap shared host? Which would be worrying from the eyes of a user where I can't really trust the longevity of the product where I would take my time to register an account and start up shop.
- columbo 14y ago
  Not the OP: My personal and business blog is on a cheap host but my product is on linode. I do this for two reasons: #1 - I don't want my blog to have anything to do with my service. I don't want it near my service. I don't want some WP-0-Day-Exploit to impact my application stack. #2 - It is cheap and easy. At least it was when I started it five years go. If I could do it again I'd just use github for blogging/announcements like this. I could pay to manage this myself on another linode vps, but really, for 99.9% of the time it just doesn't matter. With that said, if I was ever to post to HN about my business I'd probably cache the announcement on its own server (just raw html) and have all other links to my blog still remain at -big hosting provider- since 90% will just click on the link and 10% may dig deeper into the blog itself. Personally I don't think it's a big deal that the blog is hosted on some big provider. I'd be more concerned if the service was there as well.
nodesocket 14y ago
First, I would like to applaud the founder of tindie. Takes guts to quit a comfy situation/paycheck to explore a startup idea. However, I have to agree, keeping a blog up, which probably will only get a few thousands visits in a few hours, shouldn't be difficult. Switch from Apache, use Nginx. Then serve your static content from a CDN. NetDNA offers Bootstrap served for free at (http://www.bootstrapcdn.com/ http://www.bootstrapcdn.com/). Not sure which server side language you are using, but probably needs a bit of tweaking. At any rate, these are just technical details. You can find other people to help you with these sort of problems. Best of luck.
- arkitaip 14y ago
  I would say that if you're running a startup as a solo founder, don't bother wasting time and mental capacity on hosting your own blog - just use Tumblr or Wordpress.com. Unless you're in the blog platform business, it's really a no brainer (at least until you grow and have too much money and/or turn into a control freak). But bravo OP for having the courage to launch your own business! Good luck.
  - yesimahuman 14y ago
    Or WP Engine, which I'm happily using. That being said, it's unfortunate this discussion has devolved into such irrelevance. To the OP: Congrats on a great start and good luck with everything!
  - ChiperSoft 14y ago
    Or write it for jekyll and host it on github pages
emilepetrone 14y ago
Very fair comment. I actually agree- working on the backend is one of my priorities. It isn't my strong-suit but, it does need work (as today demonstrates). Thanks again and I hope you give the site/me another shot after this is fully fixed.- emile
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
147 14y ago
What is the exact setting you need to change? Since you say that an alternative is using something ligher weight, does this mean that nginx can handle this kind of load out of the box?
patio11 14y ago
Keeping WordPress up was a black hole of my time and talent, despite having shipped applications with substantially higher performance requirements than "Serve 20,000 visitors mostly static content over an eight hour period." This is totally orthogonal to programming skill or creating things that solve problems for customers. The optimizations you need to make are fiddly black magic ("Your blog goes down too often? #1 culprit: a performance optimization called KeepAlive", "How many worker processes fit in 1 GB of RAM if each take ~20 MB on average? Did you answer 48? Crashes a day later. Did you answer 36? Crashes a week later. Did you answer 24? Crashes sporadically. Did you answer 20? Hasn't crashed... yet." "Blog still going down? OK, let's break with every quickstart guide on the Internet, throw out all the work you did for Apache, and switch you to Nginx. Now we'll have new failure modes!", "You incompetent nincompoop! You just need to add caching. Oh, you already cache everything? The KeepAlive issue can kill a blog hosting a simple static .txt file? Hmm, good point... put Varnish in front of it! A nice, simple solution! And if that doesn't work add cache to your caching so you've got caches for your caches!"). There's no point at which WordPress announces "OK, I'm ready!" -- you just pick your optimizations in advance then discover new requests-per-minute numbers or access patterns or what have you which cause it to degrade or bloom into a timed-out fireball of death. Now I write a check every month for $200 to my hosting provider. Best money I ever spent, because this has lead to a 100% decrease in me having to wake up at 3 AM in the morning because Jimmy Wales decided to tweet a link to my blog.
- jbigelow76 14y ago
  Keeping WordPress up was a black hole of my time and talent, despite having shipped applications with substantially higher performance requirements than "Serve 20,000 visitors mostly static content over an eight hour period." This is totally orthogonal to programming skill or creating things that solve problems for customers. Good point but if you go from being an employee to an entrepreneur you'll need to pick up a lot orthoganal skillsets beyond programming: sys admin'ing, basic accounting, copywriting, etc... I recall you tweeted a few weeks back, the gist of it being "if all you want to do is program you're better off being an employee". That being said, congrats to the OP on taking the plunge, when I checked the site was back up and and it looks like you've got a solid concept. Best of luck to you.
thaumaturgy 14y ago
The owner downthread mentioned that he's getting traffic from Reddit right now too. While it might be good to have a conversation on HN about when it is and isn't smart to try to do it all yourself (versus spending a little bit on a knowledgeable server guy, if you aren't one), I really wish yours wasn't the top comment in this thread right now. This guy built something really cool, that hopefully will be useful to the "hackers" here -- I know it'll be useful to me, at least. It would be nice if we didn't shit on him here for having the page go down for a bit.
- patio11 14y ago
  Where's the "give this comment half my karma" button. Here's a norm for HN that I suggest as a sensible default: If you're building stuff, we're on your side. We know building stuff is hard. We know early stuff is rough. Where others see flaws, we opportunities for having better stuff tomorrow.
joelrunyon 14y ago
While it looks like Emile submitted this, so she may have been expecting it, stuff like this can catch you by surprise. Earlier this month, when my Russell Kirsch story was #1 for most of the day, I didn't even know it did until someone emailed me. By then it had caught on beyond just HN and I had 60k-100k visitors come in overnight. I got my tech guy to transfer servers and speed things up, but you can't always plan for this type of thing.
- sparky 14y ago
  OT: Emile is usually a male name of French origin (rhymes with "a meal").
  - joelrunyon 14y ago
    Er, sorry about that :-/
  - emilepetrone 14y ago
    I am very much a male. For the fact checkers out there..
- Schwolop 14y ago
  Joel - try http://hnalerts.com/ http://hnalerts.com/ to get SMS notifications when your domains are on HN or Reddit. Not my service, just a happy fan.
pdeuchler 14y ago
Another option: Use tumblr with a custom blog.yourdomain.com subdomain
- mnutt 14y ago
  My company does this currently. The upside is that the HTML is very configurable. (we have a rake task that generates a tumblr template from our rails app layout) The downside is that tumblr is down a lot more often that I'd like, and their API is down even more. Rather than using json-p to embed posts on our homepage we have an hourly job that tries to pull posts from the API; it only works about 90% of the time. Also, when you set up your company blog, make sure you set it up as a secondary group blog so that you can have multiple authors. If you start it off as a primary blog you can't change to a multi-author blog later.
localhost3000 14y ago
every time i see a negative, holier-than-thou comment like this, it makes me think very poorly of the author. i guess you've never had a site/app/product/lemonade-stand go down? you don't think the OP knows her blog is having problems? she needs you to call her out publicly? stop being such an ass.
blake8086 14y ago
This is the kind of toxic commenting that has lead to all the "are HN comments getting worse?" conversations. This guy comes in here and says "Hey guys! I quit my job to pursue something I think will make my life better!" and you leave a comment deriding the guy for his _uptime_. When I joined HN, it was a community of people all trying to lift each other up and push each other to do bigger, better things. Please don't turn it into this.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]

hahla 14y ago

I agree this is also one of the first things that I thought about as soon as I tried to visit the site. Handling reddit and hackernews front page traffic these days should not be that big for an issue for blogs. One reason this may occur would be that they are on a very cheap shared host? Which would be worrying from the eyes of a user where I can't really trust the longevity of the product where I would take my time to register an account and start up shop.

columbo 14y ago
Not the OP: My personal and business blog is on a cheap host but my product is on linode. I do this for two reasons: #1 - I don't want my blog to have anything to do with my service. I don't want it near my service. I don't want some WP-0-Day-Exploit to impact my application stack. #2 - It is cheap and easy. At least it was when I started it five years go. If I could do it again I'd just use github for blogging/announcements like this. I could pay to manage this myself on another linode vps, but really, for 99.9% of the time it just doesn't matter. With that said, if I was ever to post to HN about my business I'd probably cache the announcement on its own server (just raw html) and have all other links to my blog still remain at -big hosting provider- since 90% will just click on the link and 10% may dig deeper into the blog itself. Personally I don't think it's a big deal that the blog is hosted on some big provider. I'd be more concerned if the service was there as well.

nodesocket 14y ago

First, I would like to applaud the founder of tindie. Takes guts to quit a comfy situation/paycheck to explore a startup idea. However, I have to agree, keeping a blog up, which probably will only get a few thousands visits in a few hours, shouldn't be difficult. Switch from Apache, use Nginx. Then serve your static content from a CDN. NetDNA offers Bootstrap served for free at (http://www.bootstrapcdn.com/ http://www.bootstrapcdn.com/). Not sure which server side language you are using, but probably needs a bit of tweaking. At any rate, these are just technical details. You can find other people to help you with these sort of problems. Best of luck.

arkitaip 14y ago
I would say that if you're running a startup as a solo founder, don't bother wasting time and mental capacity on hosting your own blog - just use Tumblr or Wordpress.com. Unless you're in the blog platform business, it's really a no brainer (at least until you grow and have too much money and/or turn into a control freak). But bravo OP for having the courage to launch your own business! Good luck.
- yesimahuman 14y ago
  Or WP Engine, which I'm happily using. That being said, it's unfortunate this discussion has devolved into such irrelevance. To the OP: Congrats on a great start and good luck with everything!
- ChiperSoft 14y ago
  Or write it for jekyll and host it on github pages

emilepetrone 14y ago

Very fair comment. I actually agree- working on the backend is one of my priorities. It isn't my strong-suit but, it does need work (as today demonstrates). Thanks again and I hope you give the site/me another shot after this is fully fixed.- emile

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

147 14y ago

What is the exact setting you need to change? Since you say that an alternative is using something ligher weight, does this mean that nginx can handle this kind of load out of the box?

patio11 14y ago

Keeping WordPress up was a black hole of my time and talent, despite having shipped applications with substantially higher performance requirements than "Serve 20,000 visitors mostly static content over an eight hour period." This is totally orthogonal to programming skill or creating things that solve problems for customers. The optimizations you need to make are fiddly black magic ("Your blog goes down too often? #1 culprit: a performance optimization called KeepAlive", "How many worker processes fit in 1 GB of RAM if each take ~20 MB on average? Did you answer 48? Crashes a day later. Did you answer 36? Crashes a week later. Did you answer 24? Crashes sporadically. Did you answer 20? Hasn't crashed... yet." "Blog still going down? OK, let's break with every quickstart guide on the Internet, throw out all the work you did for Apache, and switch you to Nginx. Now we'll have new failure modes!", "You incompetent nincompoop! You just need to add caching. Oh, you already cache everything? The KeepAlive issue can kill a blog hosting a simple static .txt file? Hmm, good point... put Varnish in front of it! A nice, simple solution! And if that doesn't work add cache to your caching so you've got caches for your caches!"). There's no point at which WordPress announces "OK, I'm ready!" -- you just pick your optimizations in advance then discover new requests-per-minute numbers or access patterns or what have you which cause it to degrade or bloom into a timed-out fireball of death. Now I write a check every month for $200 to my hosting provider. Best money I ever spent, because this has lead to a 100% decrease in me having to wake up at 3 AM in the morning because Jimmy Wales decided to tweet a link to my blog.

jbigelow76 14y ago
Keeping WordPress up was a black hole of my time and talent, despite having shipped applications with substantially higher performance requirements than "Serve 20,000 visitors mostly static content over an eight hour period." This is totally orthogonal to programming skill or creating things that solve problems for customers. Good point but if you go from being an employee to an entrepreneur you'll need to pick up a lot orthoganal skillsets beyond programming: sys admin'ing, basic accounting, copywriting, etc... I recall you tweeted a few weeks back, the gist of it being "if all you want to do is program you're better off being an employee". That being said, congrats to the OP on taking the plunge, when I checked the site was back up and and it looks like you've got a solid concept. Best of luck to you.

thaumaturgy 14y ago

The owner downthread mentioned that he's getting traffic from Reddit right now too. While it might be good to have a conversation on HN about when it is and isn't smart to try to do it all yourself (versus spending a little bit on a knowledgeable server guy, if you aren't one), I really wish yours wasn't the top comment in this thread right now. This guy built something really cool, that hopefully will be useful to the "hackers" here -- I know it'll be useful to me, at least. It would be nice if we didn't shit on him here for having the page go down for a bit.

patio11 14y ago
Where's the "give this comment half my karma" button. Here's a norm for HN that I suggest as a sensible default: If you're building stuff, we're on your side. We know building stuff is hard. We know early stuff is rough. Where others see flaws, we opportunities for having better stuff tomorrow.

joelrunyon 14y ago

While it looks like Emile submitted this, so she may have been expecting it, stuff like this can catch you by surprise. Earlier this month, when my Russell Kirsch story was #1 for most of the day, I didn't even know it did until someone emailed me. By then it had caught on beyond just HN and I had 60k-100k visitors come in overnight. I got my tech guy to transfer servers and speed things up, but you can't always plan for this type of thing.

sparky 14y ago
OT: Emile is usually a male name of French origin (rhymes with "a meal").
- joelrunyon 14y ago
  Er, sorry about that :-/
- emilepetrone 14y ago
  I am very much a male. For the fact checkers out there..
Schwolop 14y ago
Joel - try http://hnalerts.com/ http://hnalerts.com/ to get SMS notifications when your domains are on HN or Reddit. Not my service, just a happy fan.

pdeuchler 14y ago

Another option: Use tumblr with a custom blog.yourdomain.com subdomain

mnutt 14y ago
My company does this currently. The upside is that the HTML is very configurable. (we have a rake task that generates a tumblr template from our rails app layout) The downside is that tumblr is down a lot more often that I'd like, and their API is down even more. Rather than using json-p to embed posts on our homepage we have an hourly job that tries to pull posts from the API; it only works about 90% of the time. Also, when you set up your company blog, make sure you set it up as a secondary group blog so that you can have multiple authors. If you start it off as a primary blog you can't change to a multi-author blog later.

localhost3000 14y ago

every time i see a negative, holier-than-thou comment like this, it makes me think very poorly of the author. i guess you've never had a site/app/product/lemonade-stand go down? you don't think the OP knows her blog is having problems? she needs you to call her out publicly? stop being such an ass.

blake8086 14y ago

This is the kind of toxic commenting that has lead to all the "are HN comments getting worse?" conversations. This guy comes in here and says "Hey guys! I quit my job to pursue something I think will make my life better!" and you leave a comment deriding the guy for his _uptime_. When I joined HN, it was a community of people all trying to lift each other up and push each other to do bigger, better things. Please don't turn it into this.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]