When 70M people visit your joke site | Hacker News Reader

When 70M people visit your joke site

warzel.substack.com

Here’s a link to the original makers own account of running the site: https://notfunatparties.substack.com/p/inside-a-viral-websit...

Discussed a couple weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26645813

I like that he's honest about getting obsessed by it, and feeling down after the attention was gone. He could've easily played it down claiming it was just for shits and giggles and didn't mean anything. "I'll never make anything again in my life that reaches 70M people" must take a while to sink in.

I guess he has come to accept that ship has sailed.

Well done, bravo! how does it feel to know you’ve made the best and most well timed joke you’ll ever make?

Ah yes, yours must be the snarkiest reply ever given.

I interpreted it as a reference to the feelings of OP. Don't think it was intended as snarky? Maybe my snark detector is broken, English is secondary language for me.

I also understood it that way but I can understand how some folks may get it the other way.

> "I'll never make anything again in my life that reaches 70M people" must take a while to sink in.

There's people that have turned single serving sites[0] into a sport and probably enjoy even wilder success than the stuck ship site. There's a tonne of sites like this here: https://www.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/

It's not hard to get something going viral anyway. Just make the topic related to something recent in the news, cobble together some basic HTML, purchase a domain, then get 'influencer' type accounts on Twitter to retweet your link and ask a few journos to write an article about it and you're off.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-serving_site

Can't view that reddit page without logging on or using their app. How ironic.

Are you on phone or pc. I could view it fine on phone and pc in browser without app and without an account. Not sure if familiar with reddit but definitely don't need account or app.

I'm on phone and very very familiar with reddit (as in: I enjoy it a bit too much for my own good) . When I visited the link I got the following message:

> To view posts in r/InternetIsBeautiful you must continue in Reddit app or log in.

These are per-subreddit rules I assume. Other subreddits works fine on phone without logging on.

Edit: Here is some thread about it: https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/epsv9m/apparent...

So it appears to be dependent on my location as well. Not my cup of "internet is beautiful".

It's weird that this "experiment" as the reddit admin called it is still going in over a year later. I wonder if the subreddit mods requested it or have no say in it or what.

I doubt subreddit mods _wanted_ this behavior. This is akin to "Sorry this site only works in Internet Explorer 5" in my view.

You would think that, but a year is a long time for an experiment to run. I suspect they could have asked reddit to move their experiment elsewhere at this point if they cared and it's actually an experiment still. Otherwise, it's not an experiment because there is no end, and it's just special behavior applied to one subreddit in perpetuity. You can still get data from that, but it's disingenuous to present it as an experiment (it could entirely be reddit being weird. I'd believe that as wel).

i could access it using old.reddit.com[0] or if you are on mobile reddit.premii.com[1] also seems to work.

[0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/ [1]: https://reddit.premii.com/#/r/InternetIsBeautiful/

That’s a bit “How to Draw an Owl”.

One does not simply "get 'influencer' type accounts on Twitter to retweet your link and ask a few journos to write an article about it". These people are all receiving tons of requests from everyone who is trying to promote anything. You're right that everything before that is super easy, but that part right there is the filter function.

Experiencing this just once creates a strong desire (addiction?) to make something popular online again. It's just really interesting to tweak these things and follow their growth (and have sleepless nights when things go wrong).

I'd love to learn about the financials. How much did everything cost? Was it worth it?* How does one reason with the expenditure?

*I do understand that Tom Neill created this while bored at home. I also understand that if created via modern methods, this project could have cost him next to nothing, and thus only benefits awaited him. I'd love to learn more.

I wrote that up here: https://notfunatparties.substack.com/p/inside-a-viral-websit...

Just wanted to say thanks: you did indeed break the news for me, anyway, despite my near-obsession with monitoring Twitter that week.

Thanks Tom, nothing better than hearing directly from you regarding this.

On the bright side if there is ever a large ship-getting-stuck-event he's already in position. Maybe the next one could be a spaceship.

What kind of hosting are we talking here. Can a $5 VPS box handle this much traffic?

You don't even need a VPS. A static website with no user input better be hosted on Vercel or Netlify, with Cloudflare as a CDN.

No need for Cloudflare, Vercel or Netlify already have CDNs.

Another option is Cloudflare themselves, with Cloudflare Pages.

There's also Firebase, and good old S3+Cloudfront.

I just launched something with AWS Amplify, which is automatic S3+Cloudfront. Insanely easy. Just link a repo.

How much would it cost, assuming 70m visitors and various page sizes (100k to 1m)?

Oh, actually a shitload. Data out is $0.15 per GB. 70m at 1mb is $10k. Straight S3 is $80, if I used the calculator right.

Vercel, Netlify and Cloudflare Pages are the same, just link a repo

Could Github Pages work too?

I don't see any reason why it couldn't.

Yes, a simple static website served with nginx on a $5 rig can handle absolutely absurd amounts of traffic. I've done it.

Stick a free cloudflare plan in front of it with caching enabled, and you'll be amazed.

What he able to monetize the site at all? Didn't see anything in the article besides him posting a few links that increased certain book sales. If he managed to get a penny for each viewer, he would have made $700k.

If not, I'm curious how anyone would best leverage a temporary & massive surge of eyeballs for the highest monetization?

I don't think anyone makes a penny per viewer for non paid sites.

1c per viewer would be $10CPM. Some sites definitely do make that, but it would generally take time and effort to get there; you wouldn't do it by just dropping some adsense ads in.

I thought his honesty was heartwarming, and also the ability to accurately retrospect on his emotions.

Technically it's still stuck (in Egypt) until the owners pay the fine / settle.

Technically, we’re all stuck in the solar system.

Good work. Reminds me of one of my old favorites, http://iscaliforniaonfire.com/

Hmm, seems it hasn't been updated because California is not on fire right now.

With a state as large as California, some part of it is almost always on fire: https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents/2021/4/5/springs-fire/

Or this one from when the LHC came online: http://www.hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com...

I was always annoyed that it didn't show where California was on fire, but then I discovered this. http://whereiscaliforniaonfire.com

I think its really cool they left a badge at the bottom of the site to show regular visitors the traffic through an analytics site. https://simpleanalytics.com/istheshipstillstuck.com?utm_sour...

Curious that he used "www.istheshipstillstuck.com" as the domain name, and "Is that ship still stuck?" for the title of the page ("the" versus "that").

And interestingly, there is a completely different website at: https://www.isthatshipstillstuck.com/

When you say the address and the title one after the other it kind of sounds better when there's a small difference.

It was basically a typo, but then enough people got slightly irritated by it that I started to enjoy having it that way.

It would be cool if he tracks Ever Given for the rest of its natural life.

related https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26645813 | Inside a viral website

Yes the articles were quite similar! I thought I had read this new one already, but site author had just done his own article first.

> The hosting company I was working with said at its peak 7,500 people were coming per second. Just ridiculous. There were two peaks — when people first heard about it and then when it was getting unstuck. There were at least 3 million people during the unstuck period. I got told by hosting company that the site got 70 million hits in total. I’m still getting between 1,000 and 2,000 people a day, even now.

I wonder what this would look like on a day and week scale network traffic graph, in Mbps

I'm guessing a site like that is on the order of 1mb per visit so my guess would be within an order of magnitude of 100 TB total, 7.5gb/s at peak. Depends a lot on caching etc of course.

It was a static site cached on Vercel. Not including the map (which is an iframe) the site was less than 100kb.

The page appears to have 265kB first party content.

265kB * 7500/s = 2GB/s = 16Gbit/s

I use the site to get to the ship tracking site as it's easier to remember. Also learned there is live ship tracking info available!

Fascinating!

not adding anything new to the story really -- plenty of discussion and info in the post from the original guy:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26645813

too bad elon musk or someone else who is famous didn't make a big donation or bid for the NFT.

"I checked the server logs and saw the traffic and was like, ‘holy shit. this might cost me a lot of money to run this thing.’"

excuse me? running a (mostly) static site that just makes API calls to third parties is costing you lots of money?

i swear, everyone's obsession with running things on per-instance resources that charge fractions of a cent that add up astronomically. run this on a $5/mo VPS in ovhcloud and save yourself the headache.

70M visitors is a lot of traffic, no matter how you host it. Assuming we are talking about 1MB per visit then that is roughly 70TB. At least my VPS in germany does have a traffic limit. Also he did statically host it on vercel if i remember correctly.

If you have hobby site, then failing action "going dark" is better than "going cost 1000 times more".

That is true, mostly i think that the initial commenter underestimated the costs, but it seems that i myself have overestimated them.

> Assuming we are talking about 1MB per visit then that is roughly 70TB.

If you visit the site today with scripts blocked, the site still works and the page is only 160kB, including 140kB of images of book covers. And the "I checked the server logs and saw the traffic" part of the story happened before they added these ads (see https://notfunatparties.substack.com/p/inside-a-viral-websit... for a better timeline)

Yeah it was statically hosted in the end (initially it wasn't quite static). When it was at its most popular, the total site size including JavaScript was around 70kb as far as I can remember, so it didn't come anywhere near as high as 70TB.

I think you’re being a tad unfair here. I’ve been a web dev of sorts for 15 years and to be honest even on my current provider I’d have no idea how much this “could” cost me if it got popular, I’d have exactly the same concerns regardless of the tech involved. Given it was a personal joke site there’s a chance £200 is “a lot of money” for him.

I pay €7,25/month for 10 GB of space and unlimited traffic. It’s probably far from the best deal out there.

How soon after your site becomes popular do you find the definition of "unlimited traffic" your host is running on differs from yours? Is be amazed if they didn't throttle it at all.

I always thought it was ridiculous that my old company marketed the product as being capable of “infinite scale”. Words like unlimited and infinite have no meaning anymore.

Your comment history makes me worry for you. If you don't already, do therapy. Times are hard, take care of yourself.

Personal attacks will get you banned here. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules.

You've also been posting many unsubstantive and/or flamewar comments elsewhere. We ban accounts that do that, so please stop.

Part of my worry was that I messed up the caching initially so it was making API calls on the server for each request. Once I fixed that, there wasn't really anything to worry about.

I'm going to fully agree to this. There's a huge obsession with bloated pages for the sake of bloat at that. Somehow they're using it as an excuse to why they need the whole per-instance cloud setup when, as you said, a $5 (cheeseburger-meal) priced a month VPS would do the equivalent job. Maybe you'd have to pay 2 or 3 cheeseburgers a month to upgrade when things get heavy... if you setup your site correctly.

Don't get me wrong either, I thought the site was awesome and visited it often during that week. Reading the post-mortem of it was super cool too... until I read how the site was developed. I get the idea of a practicing small sites with a framework of choice. You need to practice, especially in a real world environment. Nothing wrong there. But the site could have been made in strict HTML and CSS, by hand, and called it a day. No one would know the difference. It was a super simple, basic site. There was zero special in it that needed anything more than that. Sure, maybe something was going on the background, but if that ended up not being useful for the dev, it was surely a zero value addon for the user. A lot of these frameworks are the equivalent of hiring a semi-truck with a 53 foot trailer to move a couch across town. Yes, it works. Yes, there are potential benefits if something were to pop-up. But, a small city van or pick-up truck would have gotten the job done easier, cheaper, and faster. 99.9% of the time, that's all you need. If you're moving a couch, the likelihood of you needing the extra space because someone calling you up to move pallets worth of stuff is minimal. Same goes with small, single purpose sites. Basing everything on that 00.1% chance is pretty silly.

War and Peace (the book) in simple text is roughly 900kb from Project Gutenberg if I remember correctly. That's how many hours of reading? 587,000 word count. Average adult reading speed is about 200 words a minute. 2,935 minutes or 48.9 hours of reading. 2 days worth of constant reading. Minus pictures and videos, when you traverse the web, how many pages require more than a mb worth of data for providing 10 minutes worth of reading content? Twitter is probably the ultimate champion in bloat for mb to read time ratio. Design and styling is one thing that people are going to use as some excuse for the bloat. But with all the people that use HN, don't piss in my pocket. Overly graphic designs aren't needed for conveying content well. I hope I don't have to get into how all the background tracking needs to go straight to the same ring of hell that holds people who kick puppies and kittens.

I remember a day when programmers valued themselves in being efficient in delivery. Oh, the good ol'days. Now get off my lawn!

sell it as an nft.

nft is 2020/21's monorail.

They did:

https://opensea.io/assets/0x495f947276749ce646f68ac8c2484200...

there will come a day when i think read more before commenting. today was not that day. sorry

Followup : Please Leave My Ship Alone : What happens when 70M people visit the article you made about 70M people visiting your joke site?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com