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I'm sorry. I wasn't expecting that many traffic.

cough probably you need to evaluate code of your site then.

I don't think you understand what a 503 means.

Edit - In the wild, a 503 usually means that the person who built out the site did not do a very good job of estimating traffic. An empty response can return 503 if the server is overwhelmed with connections.

In other words, a 503 more likely than not has nothing to do with code and has everything to do with provisioning enough resources for the amount of traffic received. Unfortunately, that's a tough thing to get right, particularly when you land on the front page of Hacker News during extremely busy times.

My comment was just (probably ugly) joke attempt. Though, you was right - I didn't understand 503 fully, and then I became interested after your hint and googled for it.

Now I know, that it can be easily a cause (out of the many) when owner simply "suspended" site for a while, and fixing stuff.

Thank you.

Uh oh, I fear that I may have started you down the cold, dark path towards becoming a sysadmin!!! :)

If you're interested in taking this further, it's a great chance to figure out how you would:

a.) Deal with a 503 if it happened while your site was under heavy load.

b.) Harden your site to avoid 503s.

Have fun and thanks for your kind response!!

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