Ask HN: How did your “Show HN” post affect your website? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How did your “Show HN” post affect your website?

So here's the thing. I'm soon finishing a small project that I'd like to Show HN, but I'm afraid it'll cause a "hug of death". So the question goes to those who have made a "Show HN" post. How did it affect your website infrastructure? What amount of traffic should I prepare for?

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The "Show HN" for https://Artpacks.org (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8962810) got 111 points, hit #2, and stayed on the front page for most of the day it launched (and part of the following day).

Over that two-day span, Google Analytics shows: 4,475 Sessions, 4,365 Users, 72,851 Pageviews.

Hourly pageviews peaked at 10,251, according to GA.

https://artpacks.org is an art project/collection rather than a startup/product, so YMMV.

One of my $10/mo DigitalOcean boxes (that hosts a few other small projects) held up very well under the load.

It relly depends on how high you go in the Show HN.

In October '15, I posted https://sheetsu.com to Show HN, starting with $5 DigitalOcean server (512MB RAM, 1 core). Before it popped out to the first page, server died, so I have to resize it to handle the traffic.

During the peak, I've 316 users online. [1] You have to know, that if you do well on the Show HN, probably somebody will repost it, share a link, etc. So it's not only traffic from the HN itself.

I was for the whole day on the first page, in the top position. On that day I get 9,812 new sessions. Overall, from the Show HN only (referrer was HN) I get 12,715 sessions that week. [2]

[1] https://www.dropbox.com/s/44875op49ydukgt/_Screenshot%202015...

[2] https://www.dropbox.com/s/bb27l6bu3x8u57g/Screenshot%202016-...

I have never done a Show HN, but I have written and spoken before about the fact that this varies a great deal. I have had posts get thousands of page views. I have also had posts get largely ignored.

http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2014/01/unimpressive...

There are a great many factors that impact how much traffic you will get from HN. Do not assume that posting something here will cause your site to be overwhelmed with traffic. That can happen. But lots and lots of stuff gets posted here and largely ignored.

The only way to know which it will be for your project is to post it. No amount of surveying will give you a meaningful answer.

Best of luck.

Not a "Show HN"/product, but a blog. Figured I'd share to provide more data points on HN traffic numbers.

I had two posts hit front page, top 3 and top 5 respectively.

359 points, ~55,000 pageviews, ~23,000 sessions

141 points, ~31,000 pageviews, ~12,500 sessions

Running on simple shared hosting, I didn't see any downtime or at any point experience/hear reports of slowness. Obviously there's less room for aggressive caching when it comes to a product/service but my blog chugged along fine.

Worth noting these stats are approximate as I've taken out the average pageviews of my site on a day to day basis. This was also back in late 2013/early 2014 so traffic numbers may be different.

It depends on what your project does. If it's a fairly simple affair doing some CRUD or perhaps some kind of service (sign up for an account/subscription type deal) provided you're not doing things in a hacked together or otherwise sketchy way it should be fine.

However if you are launching a product that allows users to upload images which are then analyzed by an algorithm to determine what objects are in said image (read computationally expensive) unless you have specifically prepared for a huge traffic spike then you may have some issues.

I had one not too long ago that was served fine on a cheap Linode plan. I even had some guy on Reddit try to crash it and as far as I know he only succeeded in saturating his own connection. I'd thought about boosting capacity before posting it and I'm glad I didn't bother. Depends on the content and your setup though - mine was stateless and read only.

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