

What happens when you're the #1 story on HN - beagledude
http://jimplush.com/blog/article/179/What-happens-when-you-are-the--number-1-article-on-Hacker-News

======
Tycho
_So how much cold hard Adsense cash did I get yesterday? I must have cleaned
up for that giant traffic spike! Alas, 4 clicks out of 30,000 page views for a
total of $2.76 :) So don't expect a goldmine from Hacker News traffic._

I wish information like this was more forthcoming in other blogs like this.

~~~
phirephly
When I hit HN I got almost $40 from 10,000 hits, but that was mostly because I
accidentally had the link back to the homepage right above an ad unit.

~~~
dtran
_"Accidentally"_

It's funny when unintended changes and mistakes lead to better conversions. An
example that comes to mind was PlentyOfFish's poorly resized images leading to
higher profile clickthroughs since people wanted to see the images with
correct aspect ratios.

------
NathanKP
One point of correction: It is definitely possible to see current, instant
results in Google Analytics. Just click the drop down menu in the upper right
and change the time period to include the present day. By default it shows the
last month, not including the present day, but you can adjust the time period
to show just results from today, for example.

So many people do not realize this and then say that you have to wait a day
before seeing any stats in Google Analytics. On the contrary you definitely
can see instant results, the interface just doesn't make this as easy as it
should be.

~~~
corin_
Not the case, stats for the current day generally won't be properly up to
date. See my other comment on this thread
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2187209>)

~~~
jamesjyu
That really depends on the traffic your site is getting. If it's a decently
large site (> 50k PVs a day), then yes, data for the current day will be
lagged. But for most sites smaller than that, I've found the data to be only
lagged by 15 minutes or so. It's definitely improved over the past year.

~~~
corin_
Can't speak to that, I don't pay close attention to daily stats for my
personal site, and all the sites I work with are big enough to have a heavy
delay.

------
natgordon
I was a #1 story on HN this week too. I wrote up a postmortem here -
<http://natgordon.posterous.com/hackernews-post-mortem>

------
jasonkester
40k pageviews to a blog entry should never crash your server.

And yet it does all the time. It looks like this guy has a typical LAMP stack
running on a Linode slice, presumably running a single query to return a
single record and render it as HTML.

Even assuming that all 40k pageviews came in one single hour, that's still
_eleven requests per second_ , which gives you 100ms to serve each one. That's
like _years_ in CPU time. There's no reason that should even spike the CPU off
of zero. There's definitely no reason you'd need to worry about caching for a
load that small.

I just don't get it.

Is LAMP really that slow out of the box?

------
pwim
With Google anayltics, you can see the current day's traffic. You just need to
manually adjust the date range to include it.

~~~
citricsquid
Depends on your traffic volume, we drive enough that it takes at least 24
hours before it charts traffic, to see traffic from Monday I have to wait
until early Wednesday :(

~~~
pud
Even if you manually change the date range to today? Most people don't realize
that Google Analytics defaults to "yesterday" but can be manually changed to
today.

(sorry if you already know this & answered it in your previous comment. I just
don't want others to miss out on GA's real time capability)

~~~
corin_
Yes, you can change the date range to include the current day, however it
won't show the correct amount of traffic.

Officially they say that data _won't_ appear until after 24 hours [1], but
generally some of it will, but usually not all.

If you know the Analytics patterns of a site reasonably well (as I do my
company's sites) then you can often look at the day's traffic and estimate how
it's doing, but never expect it to be the final number.

(In some cases, I've actually seen traffic for the day _go down_ after twenty
four hours, once Analytics has finished working it out. I'm not sure why..)

_[1][http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en-...](http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en-
GB&answer=55544) _

~~~
NathanKP
Hmm, I have never noticed that big of a discrepancy. It seems fairly accurate
for my sites. Even when my web app got 8000 hits in a few hours I was able to
see them in near realtime. In my experience if the count is off, it can't be
off by much.

~~~
corin_
I moniter a few sites that between them hit 20+million page views a month
(~30k/hour), and can say from personal experience that, for any real idea of a
day's stats from Google Analytics, you really do need to wait 24 hours.

------
SeoxyS
The post mentions disappointment in viewer conversion. I think it's fairly
obvious that this kind of referral is awful for conversion. Viewers are loyal
to Hacker News, not to the site referred. If the post showed a promise for
more interesting content in the future, then you may gain some subscribers.
But when it's merely a link to something else cool found on the internet,
there's little incentive to subscribe.

FWIW, I had a #1 HN story that generated maybe 100 new subscribers out of
100,000 pageviews. I was impressed, however, by how many checked out the
homepage to see other posts.

PS: I find putting ads on a personal blog to be a bad idea. Unless you blog
for a living, the tiny revenue you might make from it is not worth the
unprofessional appearance of displaying ads.

------
kgtm
Google Analytics might indeed be the old man in the room, but it's free. Real
time analytics do matter when things get viral, but that kind of service comes
at a cost. AFAIK there is no free product (as in _online service_ ) that
provides such functionality with no price tag.

~~~
taitems
ObserverApp.com is free, and it has real time push notifications of every
single visitor (try it, open observer in one tab and your site in another - it
will increment in a matter of seconds).

The only problem is that nearly every second ajax link in the admin times out.
That's been broken for a long time.

------
MortenK
When I try to view the site, a blog comment field popups and takes over the
entire page, with no method of dismissing it:
<http://screencast.com/t/IwfGfxcSsZG4>

------
beagledude
I'm hoping open sourcing these stats from yesterday's article will help
someone out there. I've learned a ton from reading HN so here's something
back.

~~~
chopsueyar
Mind me asking what size Linode you are running EE on?

I have an EE install on Linode with nginx and MySQL, so I was wondering what I
could expect?

~~~
beagledude
Looks like I have the Linode 512 plan, so far so good :)

~~~
jacques_chester
I've got a small blog network running on a 512 also -- Wordpress with
supercache installed. During the Queensland floods one of the blogs got 50k
visits in a day ... and I didn't notice.

Caching. Rules.

------
csomar
I don't think Google Adsense is good for such kind of traffic. Google Adsense
works better with targeted traffic (Search Engine traffic mostly). You may
want to write a blog post and to advertise a product (affiliate program) that
might interest the HN crowd. If you sell 15 copies of it, with $10 commission,
that's $150.

------
petercooper
I've hit #1 a few times (or, more accurately, links to my site have - I didn't
submit them) and this roughly mirrors what I encountered. Between 20-35k extra
pageviews spread over a couple of days.

------
djacobs
I've hit #2 and #5 and not had to cache my site. I was running Rails 2.3.8,
thin and nginx on the cheapest slice that Slicehost sells.

Is it normal not to have to cache for HN + Reddit?

~~~
beagledude
depends on concurrent connections vs spread out, cpu, traffic of other
customers on your box, apache configurations, etc...

It's just good practice to cache when you can. There is no reason to ask the
database for the same article 1000 times a second if it's not changing. I
didn't feel the server was going to crash at that moment but I did notice
MySQL was doing plenty of work it didn't need to.

The concern was if it got picked up by another site like digg or reddit then
it could have been more of an issue.

------
locusm
Has HN readership passed that of say Slashdot? HN is now my daily read but I
stuck with SL for 10 yrs or so. Does HN have the equivalent of getting
slashdotted...?

~~~
eftpotrm
No.

<http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ycombinator.com>

<http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/slashdot.org>

------
guynamedloren
I don't think I've hit the top, but I've been on the front page of Hacker News
3 times in the past 4 days. I really should start writing about these
things...

------
codejoust
And now he is, once again, on the front page of Hacker News. The résumé you
posted earlier was indeed good-looking yet very good at conveying the
important information.

