

How Hacker News hit us with 10 000 unique visitors in 10 hours - GoranDuskic
http://whoapi.com/blog/554/how-hacker-news-hit-us-with-10-000-unique-visitors-in-10-hours/

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mcobrien
I'm surprised it wasn't higher. I got 15,000 uniques in a day and my link
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1940129>) only had 36 upvotes.

I guess there isn't a direct relationship between links people find voteworthy
and those they just want to visit.

~~~
wgx
I had around 1,800 uniques over 3 hours in 2011 - posted some stats (browsers,
OS, geo) here: <http://willgrant.org/hn-traffic-stats-summary/>

~~~
thenextcorner
I made a similar analysis over a longer period of time with a larger sample
basis. <http://thenextcorner.net/hn-users/>

Always interesting to see what systems, browsers HN users work on.

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JoeAltmaier
Interesting, but no new customers, no signups. Are HN viewers not the signing-
up type? The article was of interest but I guess their site isn't as targeted
to HN - thus no signups, makes sense.

What to take away? I hope it isn't "game Hacker News to get hits".

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Brajeshwar
Why not watch a video on how it looks like during a 2-min span during the
first hour of being on top of Hackernews!

[http://brajeshwar.com/2011/how-is-it-like-during-the-
first-h...](http://brajeshwar.com/2011/how-is-it-like-during-the-first-hour-
when-your-site-is-on-top-of-hackernews/)

~~~
51Cards
Great choice of music on the video!

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innovoid
that's so true, once my article got 500 unique visitors by only being on the
frontpage for 5 minutes :D 500 unique visitors in 5 minutes + new visitors
keep coming because it was still there in rss feeds and there is a huge
community following hackernews via rss feeds.

~~~
GoranDuskic
Exactly, plus the article gets quoted and reposted on other portals, it gets
retweeted and everything. Its just a crazy ride. Even this article is
trending, I am wondering what the results will be this time :D

~~~
pgisstilladick
Stop with the wide-eyed admiration of a someone (pg) who wishes nothing more
than to take a portion of your win.

Grow up and recognize the wider world.

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nader
Congrats! The hard part is to retain a couple of those new readers though :)

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josefresco
Times certainly have changed. About 5 years back I got frontpages on
Digg/Reddit for an article and easily saw 250K on the first day, maybe 750K
before my server crapped itself.

~~~
GoranDuskic
WoW, thats awesome! Pics or it didn't happen :D

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EdiBudimilic
I was shocked with Wordpress handling such a traffic without any noticable
server load change on an average server.

~~~
vidarh
10,000 uniques in 10 hours is only 1 unique per 3.6 seconds. It'd be more
shocking if it did cause noticeable load.

~~~
EdiBudimilic
Most of it was within the first two hours :) yeah, I didn't do the math :)

~~~
jules
People generally seriously underestimate the power of modern hardware. Suppose
you have 100 million requests in a month. That's a small country of people
accessing your website, so that will require a large bunch of big iron, right?
No. A single commodity PC box can easily handle that. 100 million requests per
month is just under 40 requests per second. Say your peak is around 100
requests per second. If your site is amenable to caching you can probably
handle that load on a single core. Even if your site can't be effectively
cached, for $5000 you can buy a terabyte of RAM these days, which can probably
hold the hot parts of your database (for comparison: compressed current-
revision-only of Wikipedia is under 8GB). Of course you need expensive
hardware to be able to put that much RAM in, but then again you probably don't
need anything close to a terabyte.

~~~
romaniv
_People generally seriously underestimate the power of modern hardware._

They also often underestimate the bloat of modern software. The difference in
page generation times between WordPress and some minimalistic CMS can be in
the order of 50 or 100. And while it's compelling to believe that WordPress
"does more", I don't believe that's the case.

~~~
jules
Absolutely. A modern quad core $100 processor doing 10 requests per second has
about 1 billion clock cycles per request. You can easily lose a factor of 100
by using an interpreted language, another factor of 10 by using a bloated
framework, and another factor of 10 by using a DB optimized for disk instead
of one optimized for RAM.

Due to network overhead (in performance, but more importantly in complexity
when programming and sysadmining) and the speed and size of modern hardware,
for the vast majority of sites it makes much more sense to run on 1 powerful
box than on 20 small boxes. And even if you do need to scale to multiple boxes
eventually (which >99.9% of websites won't have to), managing 10 boxes instead
of 200 has advantages too.

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pgisstilladick
Wow! 10,000 WHOLE people? I can barely imagine the utter joy!

Stop thinking about sucking up to people who are doing EXACTLY THE SAME THING
AS YOU.

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SimHacker
than

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benjlang
Well this will get you another 10,000 for sure. Good post though.

