
Ask HN: How much traffic to expect if your project hits HN front page? - willismichael
I have no idea what the population of HN is, not the global distribution thereof.  I&#x27;m working on a pet project that I would like to show of at some point, and in the event that it actually hits the front page (unlikely as it may be), I would like to know if I have the budget to spin up enough servers to handle the load, or if I should just point people at the github repo.<p>When other people have had their project show up on the front page, is there any pattern of how many concurrent users you topped out at, and how long most of them stuck around?
======
USNetizen
I submitted a blog post a while back that made it to the front page and it hit
about 11,000 visitors from HN and ancillary HN feed sites alone in 6-8 hours.
The traffic was elevated for the next couple weeks and even my website, which
was barely linked from the blog, saw a 50-60% increase in traffic lasting
about a week after the post. I still saw traffic from this spike up to a full
month later.

------
joepie91_
My total hits on / of when PDFy hit the frontpage
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8034431](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8034431)),
and remained there for some 24 hours, iirc:

    
    
        root@debian:/var/log/lighttpd/pdf.cryto.net# cat access.log | grep "GET / " | grep "news.ycombinator.com" | wc -l
        19387
    

That said, the Hacker News post led to a bunch of other places writing about
it a day or so later, the most notable of which was Gigazine:

    
    
        root@debian:/var/log/lighttpd/pdf.cryto.net# cat access.log | grep "GET / " | grep "gigazine.net" | wc -l
        544
    

But most of their traffic came from the document viewer they embedded in their
article:

    
    
        root@debian:/var/log/lighttpd/pdf.cryto.net# cat access.log | grep "GET /d/C8gHjDOxTLdunq1a/embed" | grep "gigazine.net" | wc -l
        41609
    

And this is what the bandwidth usage looked like during those few days:

    
    
        root@debian:/var/log/lighttpd/pdf.cryto.net# vnstat -d
    
        eth0  /  daily
    
             day         rx      |     tx      |    total    |   avg. rate
         ------------------------+-------------+-------------+---------------
          [...]
          07/13/14    767.19 MiB |  949.01 MiB |    1.68 GiB |  162.72 kbit/s
          07/14/14      1.27 GiB |    9.13 GiB |   10.40 GiB |    1.01 Mbit/s
          07/15/14      7.05 GiB |  106.73 GiB |  113.79 GiB |   11.05 Mbit/s
          07/16/14      2.89 GiB |   48.73 GiB |   51.62 GiB |    5.01 Mbit/s
          07/17/14      2.22 GiB |   24.21 GiB |   26.43 GiB |    2.57 Mbit/s
          07/18/14      1.23 GiB |   11.90 GiB |   13.13 GiB |    1.27 Mbit/s
          07/19/14      1.31 GiB |   11.88 GiB |   13.19 GiB |    1.28 Mbit/s
          07/20/14      1.38 GiB |    7.73 GiB |    9.11 GiB |  884.50 kbit/s
          07/21/14      1.44 GiB |    9.55 GiB |   10.99 GiB |    1.07 Mbit/s
          [...]
    

If I recall correctly, my HTTPd was hit with some 50-100 reqs/sec total (for
static + dynamic). It didn't really have any issues with it, despite running
on a cheap VPS with 512MB of RAM, on a non-optimal stack (lighttpd + PHP +
MySQL).

I've noticed a significant increase of recurring traffic since (it still
hovers at about 5-15GB of traffic a day as opposed to the 2GB before, and
there's a steady stream of uploads).

As long as you don't run something obscenely heavy like WordPress or Joomla,
and you don't use Apache, you'll probably be fine.

~~~
frik
Do you mind to mention the VPS hosting company? (you mentioned it is cheap:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8039666](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8039666))

~~~
joepie91_
It's RamNode ([http://ramnode.com/](http://ramnode.com/)) :)

I got a DDoS-mitigated VPS in Seattle. I believe the plan I have is normally
$15, but I used a coupon code so I pay $9.30 recurring.

I can definitely recommend them - however, I should add that their DDoS
mitigation appears to suffer from the same issues as all other cheap VPS DDoS
mitigation proxies; speeds are not always reliable, and connections
occasionally break halfway through. That's not a problem with RamNode though,
but with the mitigation provider (CNServers in this case) and/or proxy setup -
their own connectivity is rock solid.

Some other hosts I can recommend in a similar vein are RAM Host
([http://ramhost.us/](http://ramhost.us/)) and VPS-Forge ([http://vps-
forge.com/](http://vps-forge.com/)), in case you want to set up a redundant
system of sorts. I've hosted with both for years, and they're both rock solid
and very helpful as well. (Relatively) small operations like RamNode, but very
reliable.

------
binarymax
I had a project that was number 3 on the front page for a good part of a
Saturday.

I had 7500 unique visitors from HN including the traffic coming from linkbots
that re-serve HN links.

With a single node.js (express) app on an EC2 medium instance and I was fine.
I got about 10% conversion rate. It was a game with a signup page that
required you to register first.

The single instance held up the static content and the app itself for a while.
In hindsight I should have used an nginx reverse proxy for the homepage.

\--EDIT-- here is the post:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7364927](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7364927)

\--EDIT2-- changed conversion rate typo from 1% to 10%

~~~
willismichael
So by "1% conversion rate" you mean that around 75 people actually played your
game? I see some discussion on your thread about how your server got hammered
- was it the people hitting the landing page, or in-game requests?

~~~
binarymax
OOPS! I meant 10% of 7500!

About 750 people signed up to play and there were about 500 games played (a
game needs exactly 2 players).

The homepage stayed up the whole time. The stuff that got hurt was some actual
gameplay due to an exception that was getting thrown, and I hotfixed.

~~~
willismichael
Ha! Nothing like recruiting a whole swarm of HNers to find some obscure bug :)

I'm encouraged by your metrics of about 750 people and about 500 games - I
think I could probably afford enough compute power to support that for a
limited amount of time.

------
coldcode
I've gotten as much as 60,000 in 24 hours if it stays on the front page.
Recently I had one that hit 4000 in about 20 minutes but some circuit breaker
hit (which I have no clue about, not really controversial or anything) and it
dropped instantly to page 5 so the traffic died quickly. Generally at the top
you might see as much as 10/s peak. I've seen 500+ concurrent but of course
that is based on whatever Google considers concurrent.

Never had any trouble serving it (my own code, LAMP, on Amazon micro
instance). programmer.reddit.com is a little lighter. Ancillary traffic (other
sites) from a front page post might add 10% or so over time.

~~~
kapkapkap
> I've seen 500+ concurrent but of course that is based on whatever Google
> considers concurrent.

Almost sure that it means at least one hit within the last 5 minutes.

------
bubblicious
My website usually has very little activity (about 100-200 visits per day for
an open source project) and out of nowhere I went #1 on HN last week-end for a
blog article.

From saturday to monday: 80,935 unique visits with peaks of 600 simultaneous
people on site. Out of those 81K, 24,661 came from HN. The average time spent
on site was 2:11. No real pattern, things started going viral as soon as the
article hit the front page (which took a couple of hours). Things died off
very quickly after 3 days of intense load.

Now I had never expected that type of load... In fact my blog is hosted on the
_cheapest_ shared hosting service NearlyFreeSpeech. I want to mention that
they held the charge perfectly. I wrote a quick article about it with more
numbers: [http://www.nicolasbize.com/blog/and-the-best-shared-
hosting-...](http://www.nicolasbize.com/blog/and-the-best-shared-hosting-
service-is-nearlyfreespeech/)

------
diggan
I submitted a pet-project called ngProgress[0], a progressbar provider for
AngularJS. It's not a project per se, more a smaller library I decided to
share here. It was on the frontpage for almost one day and on the second page
for a day as well. I got about 10'000 visits during the first day and about
half, 5000 during the second day. This also includes shares on Twitter that
came after posting it here.

Most people just opened the page and closed it within ten seconds. The second
largest group had the page opened for about one minute before closing. Please
note the landing page for ngProgress[1] is very simple though and has almost
no engagement except demo for the library.

[0] -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6250112](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6250112)

[1] -
[http://victorbjelkholm.github.io/ngProgress/](http://victorbjelkholm.github.io/ngProgress/)

------
viggity
The link to my data visualization was on front page for ~8 hours. I got 10K
hits first day, 2500 second day, 400 third day. The post was not specifically
pimping my side project, but was a visualization of Seed Funding. That being
said we had about 500 people from HN request beta access.

link:
[https://www.machete.io/board/view/seed_db_funding_rounds/157...](https://www.machete.io/board/view/seed_db_funding_rounds/157a518b-cbf2-4bde-84b4-98cfa0bc15ba)

If you want to track visits from HN, MAKE SURE YOU ENABLE HTTPS BY DEFAULT AND
LINK TO AN HTTPS LINK. It is in the http spec that no referrer info is passes
from an https site (like HN) to an http site.

One last bit - we are hosted on a small Azure instance, we used loader.io to
test what kind of a load we could handle and it shit out pretty quickly. We
implemented some output caching and it handled the HN flood just fine (200-300
concurrent users).

------
villek
My post [1] made it to #8 on the front page last week and stayed there about 5
hours. I haven't made proper analysis yet, but here are rough numbers. The
page got ~3500 visits, most of which within the first 24 hours. Most
concurrent users was ~80. The first 24 hours got the linked app ~500
downloads, so that would give a pretty good conversion rate. I don't have data
on how much of that came through the website or HN, though.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8070131](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8070131)

------
dkriesel
When my Xerox Story was hit last year
([http://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-
workcentres_...](http://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-
workcentres_are_switching_written_numbers_when_scanning)) I got about 200k
hits in two days, at peaks reaching about 10k per hour. All numbers are from
google analytics so real values might be higher. Also, it's not only hn,
consider also the follow-ups (in my case, shortly after hn, the front pages of
slashdot and reddit hit me as well).

~~~
dkriesel
Addition: I use Dokuwiki as a blogging system, which was accompanied by a
varnish cache. The combination of both was able to cope with the load (and
additional load from mass media taking up the story) very well on a standard
hosting server.

------
mattybrennan
Apparently, more than GrandArmy can handle with this USPS redesign post...

------
zeratul
I also saw ~7000 visits first day but that was in 2012. Here are some
conclusions of my web traffic analysis:

[https://github.com/entaroadun/hnpickup/wiki/Hacker-News-
Pick...](https://github.com/entaroadun/hnpickup/wiki/Hacker-News-Pickup-Rate-
Web-App-Analytics)

Here are multiple screen shots of the google web traffic analytics interface:

[http://hnpickup.appspot.com/hnpickup_web_app_statistics_snap...](http://hnpickup.appspot.com/hnpickup_web_app_statistics_snapshot.png)

------
davidgerard
My WordPress blogs have hit the HN front page a coupla times.

I got about 6000 hits in an hour the first time and 10,000 the second time.

WP-SuperCache coped admirably in both cases. The mod_rewrite caching was
enough to cope with HN. (I sent the developer, Donncha O Caoimh, £10 with
gratitude!)

But what really made the server cry: being on HN led directly to being on
Reddit, where the second popular post got 80,000 hits in a day. In this case I
had to put WP SuperCache into direct-cache mode. Then it was fine.

------
3stripe
A blog article of mine (hosted on Squarespace) was on the top of the frontpage
for most of a day back in January and received approx 25,000 pageviews.

(And also, incidentally, 42 article comments and counting, without a single
nasty/sarky/snarky one.)

The same article has since received 500 Facebook likes and was tweeted around
360 times.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7075537](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7075537)
| 334 points

------
aith
This time last year my project VimSnake.com was in the top 3 for most of the
day. I made the stats public:

[http://statcounter.com/p9177631/summary/daily-rpu-labels-
bar...](http://statcounter.com/p9177631/summary/daily-rpu-labels-
bar-20130816_20130823/?guest=1)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6223946](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6223946)

------
dronehire
We've had a couple of blog posts hit #1. From memory, we received around
35,000 visitors on each occasion, spaced over the course of several hours.

~~~
danesparza
What was your converstion percentage, and what kind of hardware (virtual or
otherwise) did you run to support this?

------
wellboy
I had this Android app
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hour.chat](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hour.chat)
on the front page last week. It got 45 upvotes and also around 450, pretty
good.

So for an app you could probably say 10 downloads per upvote.

------
mdewinter
Been on the frontpage a few times, mostly weekends. 2/3 days got me 30,000 to
60,000 hits/day (24h) per time. My website is static, optimized and hosted on
a cluster of geo-spread nodes so they were still doing nothing, the statistics
server (piwik) did have a load of 4 at peak...

------
kimburgess
When a few readers collectively had the poor judgement to vote a post I wrote
to the front page it brought in around 12k uniques from HN and associated
parasitic sites over the space of 6 hours or so. This was peaking around 200 -
250 simultaneous visitors.

------
dirtyaura
Unless it goes viral outside of HN, based on my experience of a few front page
hits, you can get 10K-50K visitors. As most of visitors will bounce, serve a
static landing page and you can handle the traffic easily with a single server

------
kephra
My site made it several times to HN main page. Rule of thump is, that every
upvote equals about 100 visitors, while the site is on HN, and that about same
number of visitors come during the next days by tweets and facebooks.

------
talles
I got 26k pageviews when I managed to reach first page
([http://blog.talles.me/my-hacker-news-front-page-
day.html](http://blog.talles.me/my-hacker-news-front-page-day.html)).

------
olalonde
Happened to me a few times (for technical articles/code). If I recall
correctly it was around 3000-7000 unique visitors. My site is hosted on Github
pages so I didn't have to worry about the load.

------
shogunmike
I've had a few posts hit the front page over the last couple of years. I had
between 5,000 and 10,000 unique visitors (as Google Analytics defines them)
over the following 24hrs for each post.

------
stangeek
10-20k total if it doesn't go viral outside of HN. Maybe 100-200 concurrent at
peak. Don't worry about your server, unless it's a box at your home it should
handle the traffic...

------
viach
I've got my project on the front page #20, it led to 500 visitors in 3 hours.
Not a huge success i would say :) The interesting question is how much
_conversion_ to expect.

------
kanakiyajay
My blog [http://jquer.in](http://jquer.in) was briefly (about 3 hours) on the
front page. I got around 1500 Unique Visitors according to GA.

------
masukomi
If I recall correctly, I seemed to top out around 300 visitors per minute.
Load stayed close to that for about 2 days (dunno about US evening hours)

------
new299
About 10 to 20,000 in my experience for a site that's on the front page for
about a day.

------
duiker101
I agree ~10,000 visits for a standard front page story, with ~200 simultaneous
visitors.

------
stasy
I got ~26k from 12 hours as number 2.

