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Comment by azov | Hacker News Reader

What happens if I'm a smallish site and suddenly get slashdotted / DDoSed? Will I be charged thousand dollars? Is there a way to cap monthly costs?

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With the current model, your charges would spike. Which is bad.

But we plan to offer caps and the option to auto-sample if you exceed your tier.

Your target market is also probably familiar with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burstable_billing

Perhaps something like Cloudflare might serve as reasonable insurance against DDoS?

Would also like to know this.

Also, I assume anonymous visitors are also users?

Correct.

As a site owner you could easily only attach the JS snippet to people who have logged in.

But then you can't do conversion analysis anymore.

Your right, but like everything else there are pros and cons and tradeoffs that should be considered.

Lacking conversion analysis is not a "con." It is a mandatory feature in something like this.

http://cdn.memegenerator.net/instances/400x/20294656.jpg

Seriously though, for my purposes I'm much more interested in tracking events of my current users. Obviously for you conversion funnel analysis is important, and thats cool, but realize everyone has different needs (and budgets!)

Icelancer is right. Conversion analysis for landing pages is is a core, mandatory component. If I'm going to have to use something like Mixpanel for the landing page, then I might as well use Mixpanel for everything. "Obviously for you conversion funnel analysis is important, and thats cool, but realize everyone has different needs" is a severe understatement of how crippled an analytics platform would be without conversion funnel analysis.

Don't get it confused, no one is saying that conversion analysis isn't important or shouldn't be included in the featureset. All I was trying to point out that you don't have to include the code for everyone if you don't need or want to for whatever reasons.

Being ddossed is not going to affect you. For Heap to kick in, the page needs to be rendered and their javascript snippet processed. A DDos attack is just going to send lots of traffic (eg: a gazillion wget requests made to your domain. Your apache or nginx logs are the ones that are going to explode.)

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