Comment by saching90 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by saching90 | Hacker News Reader

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You spend day and night on building a product, you make sure everything works right and its scaled for traffic. Once you have a beta product ready, you decide to blog about it, you meticulously work on generating some good content, fire up a large instance on AWS, set up a wordpress blog, and the blog is live. Now you decide to post about it on HN, fortunately some people like what you have written, you start getting traffic.

And BOOM, suddenly you find out that the large instance on AWS, cannot handle the traffic, you are befuddled its not like the server is getting million hits/sec. You thought a large server would be enough to handle a single wordpress blog, and you realize that's not the case.

Now you go back and start fixing your self hosted wordpress blog, you feel sad that you missed out on audience because the server crashed, your work gets derailed because now you also have to maintain the blog server.

I agreed I too would have been irritated to see the link not working, but its not that you switch to an x-large instance each time you post a link on HN. Sometimes you just want somethings to work. But alas that's not the case.

I empathize with you, but your experience highlights the flaws in the approach you're advocating.

I'll use myself as an example: I'm a self-taught developer who has built and managed high-profile, high-usage websites/web applications. I probably could not pass one of your algorithm-based FizzBuzz tests, but if I was hiring and you suggested that a site should scale simply because you threw it on a large AWS instance, I would not consider your candidacy further regardless of your ability to pass a FizzBuzz test.

I did not intend to say that the blog should work simply because we threw it on a large instance, we have been running our site on AWS and have successfully handled much larger load. We never needed to move beyond a larger server for the main site, of course with horizontal scaling. What I meant was, when you are swamped with so many things you don't want to spend too much time on things like maintaining your blog.

You want to focus on the product, fix bugs, look after feature request, produce high quality content. And then your blog crashes and things get derailed.

> I did not intend to say that the blog should work simply because we threw it on a large instance...

That's precisely what you said:

"You thought a large server would be enough to handle a single wordpress blog..."

> when you are swamped with so many things you don't want to spend too much time on things like maintaining your blog.

A competent developer should be able to set up a load balanced WordPress blog (with Nginx/PHP-FPM, Varnish and a separate database server) in a day or less. There are a number of well-written tutorials on this.

HN is not the place for parody but I want to rewrite your entire paragraph talking about developers who ship gigantic systems and suddenly find out that a company is rejecting them because they don't code the intricacies of bubble sort on a white board from the get-go.

So is there a simple solution?

Cloudflare

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