Ask HN: My site, Flightlite.com, just got featured on Lifehacker - help | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: My site, Flightlite.com, just got featured on Lifehacker - help

9 pointswhiskers18 comments

I posted my side project a while back (http://flightlite.com) a very visual flight tracking tool for flights currently in the air.

I've just been hit with more traffic in 20 minutes than the two months the site has been live, it's a bit slow.

I've been struggling to find a way to justify the data costs for running the service (it's not an issue considering the low traffic up to now) and I'd stuck it on the back burner while doing some bread and butter work.

I really want to find a sponsor to help cover the data costs and of course get some lovely prominent branding on the site. I need around £1-2000 pcm to service up to 1,000,000 visits with better hardware and pay the per-transaction data costs.

Is anyone interested? Does anyone know anyone who might be interested?

For now I don't care about making any money off it - it's a labour of love. But with some time to evaluate options it could be profitable I'm sure!

@phlux "Make it so that you can see "all flights out of SFO/into SFO" by that carrier - then list the tickets available for each of the flights/destinations in the next few days."

Agreed, and then...

- Contact the site admins for the major airport hubs (SFO, LAX, ORD, JFK) and sell to them - Contact all those independent Wifi operators at airports and sell them, they're hungry for content - Contact Virgin, Richard's guys are always up for something new & different! - Add Twilio.com SMS API, a "GroupMe" for flight notification?

Thanks for the extra ideas :)

I guess I'm just working out /how/ to contact these people - I'm more a write code kinda guy! I'll have to learn fast :)

It might help to mention the stack you're on, as well as your current hosting setup. Maybe someone can help you by letting you borrow a few servers, or help you tweak things.

EC2 small instance at the moment. I can afford to upgrade that for a while but I don't have the time to do it this second, I will be doing tomorrow though!

It's all on a LAMP stack.

See if you can cache pages that don't change too often. If you don't have the time to setup Varnish or similar at least try to cache to /tmp/

Feel free to contact me (email in profile) if you need guidance or setup help

Thanks for the offer of help - I think I've mitigated the worse with a minor functional change now. If it gets nasty again I'll definitely be in touch :)

Might want to upgrade from the small instance sooner than that, the site seems completely unresponsive right now.

I know :( if i could this second I would but I have guests arriving for the weekend, it's terrible timing really!

I may have controlled it a bit by replacing the "random" link with a specific flight instead. Looks like that was causing most of the problems - keeping an eye on it.

I've now had four times the traffic of the past two months in one hour. The first time something like this has happened to one of my projects - it's quite exciting!

Congrats man! I saw your original thread when you first posted, it's really cool to see your project taking off! :)

Whether it's "taking off" (!) or not remains to be seen ;) Thanks for your good wishes :)

Exciting though! phlux is being super helpful in guiding me in the right direction to make something of it!

Interesting, I started a site in 2005 (flightr.com) that was to allow you to pick flights based on a certain price and see on google maps what legs flew out of any given airport given that price... Kind of like a destination lottery.

The project died after I couldn't get much interest in it. But I still have the domain - took everything offline some time ago though...

After about a year or so, the same features started popping up in sites like kayak.

(although that may be in part to me showing early revs to a buddy who worked there)

Flightlite is very much about tracking what's in the air right now (visiting relative, the plane you'll be departing on, previewing a route, just being a plane(plain!) nerd, etc) :)

I've definitely thought about integrating pricing information / ticket affiliation stuff. But it is a personal project, and unless it was getting enough of the right kind of traffic it wouldn't be worth it as I couldn't afford to market etc effectively.

I had some thoughts on sponsorship:

Make it so you can brand a version of the site. e.g. build a verrsion for Virgin America only flights. Make it embbedable widget. License it to the airlines as a widget they can give the link to any affiliate partner - either ticket sales or marketing affiliates.

The affiliates can have a "where is virgin flight now" widgets embedded into any page with a single embedd-link.

Do this through embedly?

Copyright whatever you can about it.

Make it so that you can see "all flights out of SFO/into SFO" by that carrier - then list the tickets available for each of the flights/destinations in the next few days.

etc.. etc..

Phlux - the per airline branding is exactly something I had thought of - I'm looking for a contact in the industry who could help make it happen :)

Yes it would be great to be the de facto widget for airlines to show their fleet status etc - in fact that would be the dream! Nice concept :)

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/ravi-simhambhatla/1/283/982

http://www.linkedin.com/in/rickwysong

Search your contacts for intros. I have a shared connection with Ravi - whom I could ask to connect you.

But you need to build the example first - then SHOW them that it is already running.

phlux - you're awesome.

It's really unfortunate timing, I have guests arriving to spend the weekend here in about 10 minutes but can we talk further by e-mail? jon@flightlite.com.

I'll try to get something together tomorrow if you think they might be interested. I'm happy to completely co-brand the site for the right sponsor.

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