This is a hacker in the truest sense of the word. He builds stuff just because he loves building stuff. He is a student at a University here in Jamaica. He isn't building it to be cool, or chasing the latest web 2.0 fad of the week. He didn't know HN until I introduced it to him, and he is young (say 19/20).
He built http://wapcreate.com - a WAP site creator.
That's right, WAP...not iOS or Android optimized HTML5 sites. Good, old fashioned WAP sites.
The most amazing part of the story though is that he is running it on 2 dedicated servers in Germany, it's a hack job (PHP, a bit of Ruby & a bit of Java). But once he picked up traction, he got so much traffic that he hasn't been able to keep the servers online.
In the first image - http://i.imgur.com/yEbyh.png - you will see that he got over 1.5M uniques. The vast majority of the time period covered here (the last year) was either very low traffic - pre-traction - or servers offline due to excessive traffic.
In the 2nd image - http://i.imgur.com/Pu8da.png - you will see that about 1.2M of those visits were in the 3 month period of June 1st - Aug 31st. His servers melted down towards the end of August and he ran out of money to pay his server bills. He eventually got it back up again a few weeks later, and the traffic spiked again and the servers crashed a few weeks later again.
In the 3rd image - http://i.imgur.com/HJ4gy.png - you will see that the vast majority of the visits are from Asia (even though he is 1 guy in the rural areas of Jamaica).
In the 4th image - http://i.imgur.com/JSQ48.png - and perhaps the most striking you will see the diversity of devices that the visitors are coming from. Most of them are from "feature phones". i.e. A multitude of versions of Nokia phones. Notice that this is just 1 - 10 of 508 device types.
He presented at a conference I went to, here in Jamaica, and he and I started speaking. I am helping him figure out how to proceed in a sustainable way. i.e. getting this thing stable, and then generating revenue.
After speaking to him for many weeks, I finally realized how insane his accomplishment is. Apparently, in all of this, he had been creating his site on computers that were not his. He either used his school computers, or borrowed machines from people. His Aunt is buying him a 2nd hand Thinkpad for Christmas - for which he is EXTREMELY stoked.
So while we are all chasing the billions doled out by Apple on the App Store and the newest, sexiest SaaS app idea with fancy $29/mo recurring revenue, with our cutting edge macbook pros and iPads - here is one guy using borrowed hardware, making a creation app for a technology that we have long since forgotten, generating crazy traffic and usage and struggling to even make a dime from his creation.
The world is a funny place, and this internet thing that we live on - is massive. As big as TechCrunch & HN are, there is so much more out there.
If you think you can help out in any way, either donating computing resources or anything else that can help us get this site back online and helping him start to generate revenue from this - then feel free to reach out to me.
P.S. If you want to dig into it some more, check out what some of the fans of the site are saying on it's FB page. I am not trying to trick you into liking the page. It only has ~1500 likes, but you can see passionate users commenting (both complaining about the downtime and praising some of the features).