
Anatomy of a Crushing (2011) - gsylvie
https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/03/anatomy_of_a_crushing/
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gsylvie
My favorite line:

> In my defense, heavy write loads seemed like the last thing Pinboard would
> ever face. It was my experience that people approached an online purchase of
> six dollars with the same deliberation and thoughtfulness they might bring
> to bear when buying a new car.

~~~
pjc50
This is sadly true and a kind of "bikeshedding". It's why virtually all mobile
games transitioned from paid-upfront to the current model of dangling progress
in front of the user and offering to pay to relieve the artificial obstacle.

(My favourite line is "This is especially true in the world of Rails and other
frameworks, where there is a tendency to treat one's app like a high-level
character in a role-playing game, equipping it with epic gems, sinatras,
capistranos, and other mithril armor into a mighty "application stack"". )

~~~
dilap
> It's why virtually all mobile games transitioned from paid-upfront to the
> current model of dangling progress in front of the user and offering to pay
> to relieve the artificial obstacle.

Yes, that, but also because people will pay a lot more for IAP, over and over
again. (Total amounts paid for super-engaged users will run to 10s of
thousands of $, far beyond what you can even charge for a single app.)

(And on the flip side, the developer has to continue to improve and maintain
the game to keep the $ coming.)

Much of the time, in my experience, when you pay to download an unknown app,
it'll end up being poorly implemented in some way, and never made better. It's
like paying $2 for a cup of coffee, but 95% of the time, the coffee turns out
to be dirty water.

~~~
DougN7
Exactly. I'd pay to try many more apps if I could refund the crap. The best
would be a 1 hour free trial. If I don't uninstall after one hour, bill me. If
I do uninstall, don't. Apps could cost 10x what they do now if that was
possible because I'd see the value, rather than gambling like today.

------
felixgallo
Fundamentally, Yahoo is a charity dedicated to the stealth funding of
misanthropic single-founder Renaissance twitter accounts.

~~~
jolux
this is hilarious. don't know why you're being down voted ;)

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mirceal
Given how events played out, I think this went exceptionally well.

Also, nowadays with the cloud and co. it's easy to forget / fully appreciate
how much complexity is abstracted away for you.

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luckystartup
The main takeaway for me is that dedicated hardware is a nightmare when you
have large traffic spikes. You could save a ton of stress by running this on a
cloud platform with autoscaling, such as AWS or Heroku. You can always spin up
a reserved instances on a long-term contract when you hit a certain baseline
level of demand. And you should never consider dedicated servers or colocating
until you hit that point.

AWS or Heroku could have easily handled the "freemium" traffic that would have
crushed these servers, instead of only accepting paid users. And it sounds
like that might have been a far more lucrative opportunity.

~~~
pjc50
_If_ your app is designed to autoscale, _and_ you're prepared to have Amazon
charge you an arbitrary amount for the privilege, _and_ your cashflow through
the payments processor is faster than you have to pay AWS.

(How do people scale cloud DBs? Presumably you can't just keep increasing the
write speed into a single DB?)

~~~
luckystartup
Autoscaling is free to set up on AWS [1]. All web server code should be able
to scale, and there's nothing special about autoscaling. The easiest (and
default) way is to just spin up servers based on CPU usage.

For Heroku, you can use a third-party service that costs $10 per month [2].

If you use Amazon RDS, it's pretty easy to scale your database both vertically
and horizontally [3].

If you can use Amazon DynamoDB [4], scaling is something you will never, ever
have to worry about. Not even when you have millions of daily users.

[1] [https://aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/](https://aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/)

[2] [https://www.hirefire.io/](https://www.hirefire.io/)

[3] [https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/scaling-your-amazon-
rd...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/scaling-your-amazon-rds-instance-
vertically-and-horizontally/)

[4] [https://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/](https://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/)

~~~
chousuke
Eh, you "never, ever" have to worry about DynamoDB scaling in a perfect world
where marketing is literally true.

If you read Amazon's documentation, there's quite a lot that you need to pay
attention to if you want DynamoDB to actually perform _and scale_ well for
your application.

You don't get scalability for free. Tradeoffs and effort are always required.
In Amazon's case you can usually throw money at the problem, but even that has
its limits.

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Mithaldu
-

~~~
pjc50
You've got them confused with Pinterest.

~~~
Mithaldu
Well damn, so i did. Thanks for pointing out my mistake. :)

