#1 on Hacker News

Good news:

The blog post which we spent many hours creating in hopes that it would be a viral hit on Hacker News, was indeed a hit! It ended up #1 on Hacker News for several hours yesterday. Our blog got more than 10,000 visits yesterday, compared with the usual 10. Interestingly enough, I had actually written this post off entirely. I published it almost a month ago after several weeks of data analysis, writing, and even hiring an infographic designer on Fiverr. After publishing, I submitted to Hacker News, tweeted it, cross posted it to Dev.to, and... flop! Nothing. Barely a handful of hits. However, yesterday, in a reply to another post on Hacker News, I linked our article. Someone must have found it and submitted separately because within a few minutes it was #1 and our site was getting slammed with traffic.

Therein lies the bad news:

We stupidly did not prepare for an onslaught of traffic and our site was barely accessible during the initial crush. How embarrassing to spend so much time creating a post in hopes it gets a crush of traffic, only for that to happen and to be unprepared for it! It's especially embarrassing that this happened to us once before, and I'd forgotten. Anyway, it was resolved in relatively short order by throwing Cloudflare in front of our Wordpress blog.

The the end, we got a handful of free signups to StatusGator from our post which is not as great as we had hope. I think moving our blog to our product's site rather than our company's site will help, and that is in the works. But in the end, it was still heartening to see people appreciated and were interested in our content. It's motivating me to continue writing.