

Ask HN: Hosting an event on Heroku, App Harbor, or EC2 - kyledr

At work, we're considering hosting for a one day event that may receive considerable traffic over four hours (we hope for 100,000 visitors). The site will most likely be .NET due to a tight deadline and us knowing .NET better. Here's a quick rundown of the simple things the site needs: one form that will be used frequently, all text fields; one comment form used less frequently, also text; image upload used infrequently; image and comment feed for moderation; another feed of approved comments and images; probably to send about 30,000 emails. So it's simple enough, and if we host assets on S3, we should offload a lot of the traffic to S3.<p>Our likely candidates are Amazon EC2, App Harbor, or some other dedicated server. I'm not sure how good App Harbor is. I hear great things about Heroku but have no idea what traffic it could support. If there is a strong argument for Heroku over everything else, I'd be interested to hear it. Our imperative is to keep the site up and running well during the whole event.<p>Any tips? This is my first introduction to such a large volume of traffic. I'd greatly appreciate any advice.
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collint
I would suggest working out a deployment strategy that is portable, or at
least prepare for more than one scenario.

If this is a one day event and you have a PR cost for it you can't afford to
be in a situation where you can't deliver based on your choice of service
provider.

Could probably use puppet or something and just get the appropriate keys. Get
some sort of dynamic DNS set-up.

You could probably spend a couple/few hundred an hour for somebody with expert
level experience to bang out some scripts for you, just to ensure it's been
well configured and hopefully given some sort of stress test.

This sort of stuff is possible with today's available infrastructure. We
really have a responsibility to use the tools the best way we can.

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macca321
You want to go with Rackspace cloud sites. I think its basically shared
hosting with lots of sites on lots of machines.
[http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/cloud_hosting_products/sites/...](http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/cloud_hosting_products/sites/pricing/)

AppHarbor/heroku don't really seem suitable to me - they charge per worker

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blcArmadillo
I don't have any experience with it but for the sake of conversation what
about Microsoft's Azure: <http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/>. Seems like
that should be a good platform to run a .Net app off of.

