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Comment by bacro | Hacker News Reader

I guess it was so hot, that the database melted.

I'm hosted on Digital Ocean, and the irony is, I'm literally mid-migration to Ghost from Wordpress — if this had happened a week later this wouldn't have happened.

I'm trying to figure out how to upgrade the droplet but being honest, my husband is the one who set all this up for me, so it's going to take me a minute to figure out how to add more bandwidth or whatever.

if you're expecting more bursty traffic coming your way from reddit or HN, it might be best to deploy a static site out to something like Vercel, GitHub Pages, Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, et cetera. it's not really as easy as running from a WordPress instance but it'll better handle these sort of events.

DigitalOcean's App Platform supports static sites too.

I'm trying to figure out how to upgrade the droplet but being honest, my husband is the one who set all this up for me

Yeah, HN can be all "why didn't you just...?" when a site gets hit with traffic, but you know what? I've been in this industry for over 30 years, had a decent stint at Microsoft and other companies you've heard of, working on stuff you've probably used. And if my stupid blog somehow ended up on the front page of $POPULAR_SITE I wouldn't have the first clue how to increase bandwidth. Oh, 30 years of this shite means I know where to immediately start looking, but off the top of my head? phhhhht And it sure as hell would take me more than "a minute to figure out how to add more bandwidth or whatever". :-)

Point is, your page hit the HN lottery, no need for apology. I can bookmark it for later.

This - I've worked fullstack on apps that do unfathomable numbers of connections per second. But for a personal blog the best thing I could muster is probably go to the cloudflare site with my wallet in hand and click around nervously until I figure out how to buy caching from them before it falls off the top page of hacker news.

If I can figure out how to GET to my wordpress page for long enough, I'll set up a redirect and mirror it as an article on https://obsidianroundup.org/ — which is literally what I was working on this week, haha, the nice folks at Ghost's concierge already helped me do it for my history nerd stuff newsletter.

Someone reached out and said I can use Cloudflare to fix this, so I'm gonna go try that, doot doot.

It's the database that is being hit(multiple times probably) every page request. typically you would add a caching layer to wordpress so that each url would get cached for N minutes so you don't need to do the expensive rendering each time.

If you want something quick and easy, just sign up for a free account at Cloudflare and hook up their CDN. It's a useful thing to have even when you've switched to WordPress, too.

Or, uh, switched to ghost. Although ghost could likely handle it on its own

Ah, bless, this is exactly what I am doing right now and it is much less terrifying than I thought it would be.

Ironically, this has been on my todo list to learn — I want to mirror my Obsidian notes and that requires Cloudflare and before today I've been too nervous to muck around with it.

It's an old problem. You just need WP-Cache or WP-SuperCache or successor plugins. i.e. not your fault, this happens to everyone who runs WP.

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