Alchemist Camp is on the front page of HN right now
The thing that might be interesting to others is how much traffic they're sending. At the peak it didn't break 200 requests per minute.
As I've previously discussed on IH, my site did fine in load testing up to around 1k requests per second on a $5/month Digital Ocean droplet. This means that HN sends less than 100th of the traffic to overwhelm it, at least for something people click on a similar amount.
Also, I completely forgot to set up any caching or any rate limiting on "articles" which are a new kind of thing on my site! I could be in trouble if someone decides to DDOS my little tutorial, but all in all it validates my belief that most people spend way too much time worrying about scalability in the early stages!
Grats on the traffic and front page status!
Scalability is one of those things that "isn't a problem until it's a problem". Good on you for letting it rip and then thinking about that finer details of that.
In most web app situations it's so easy to do simple scaling for most situations that consideration of the finer points can be a 'feature' saved for after you've got something going.
There are degrees, too. This site could pretty easily handle the traffic IH had last year (and possibly even current IH traffic levels) and it will likely never get close to that much usage.
I believe in being ready for one order or maybe two orders of magnitude of growth... just not in "provisioning for the apocalypse".
Great results, congrats!
I wonder, though, what is your business model?
Thanks!
I sell subscriptions to premium content. Most of the tutorials are free, but some people pay more for access to everything.
Congrats! Saw this a little late, but gave you an upvote :)
Haha, thanks. I didn't realize it got traction myself until pretty late!
@rosiesherry did you move this post to the Growth group?
I'm pretty sure I posted from the main page without any tags and I'm not sure how it ended up in a group.
I did.
In that case I should share that the event probably won't "grow" my site much. I got about 300x more visits than usual but just 5 (email) subscribers. A typical day gets 2-6!
Mostly it was just good validation on the usefulness of the tutorial and the comments about irrational scaling fears mentioned in the post. Getting on the front page of HN is nice, but it's not much of a growth strategy for most indiehacks.
Are you sending traffic directly to your droplet? If so you should stop doing that and put CloudFlare in front of it, they have a free plan that's plenty good enough and has a ton of features to help make your site faster and more resilient.
Sure am! Has the site ever seemed slow to you?
This comment was deleted 7 years ago