Watch Voat.co Bitcoin donations pour in | Hacker News Reader

Watch Voat.co Bitcoin donations pour in

biteasy.com

20 pointsnvk15 comments

Any one with inside information on what is going on? Are they running their own server farm? Are they having problems adapting their software to work with multiple servers? Otherwise, I don't understand why with the funds coming in they haven't already scaled up if they are using a provider like AWS. The current balance of 15.38 bitcoin is around $3900 USD.

I don't think they initially used a cloud hosting platform that could scale, and I think they are currently migrating everything to a solution that can scale

Voat is an ASP.NET application running on windows servers with IIS. As someone with a lot of experience in that stack, I can understand why they're struggling - scaling is more difficult and more expensive on a Windows stack. I also suspect that the voat guys are just inexperienced, I hear that they're just two guys in college and the Github repo says that voat started as a hobby project.

I'm pretty sure they've added 1 or 2 more people since.

If they are on the MS Stack, Azure can help with scaling.

Why does anyone ever use this over Apache or Nginx or anything else?

Voat is built in asp.net MVC, so once the .net framework goes to the next version they can actually use either of those easily

AFAIK they're on Azure now.

I stumbled upon a post today on Voat's scalability:

http://www.aaronstannard.com/voat-scalability/

This is the key issue it seems:

>As for the SignalR issues, I was able to confirm that Voat is running on a single box. Not a big deal given that it's still a hobby project for the developers, but the fact that it's not designed to run on anything other than a single box is an obvious problem. Either remove SignalR or support a backplane for it.

$3900 USD is about 3 weeks wages if you hired someone for a year.

If that's all you have I think you can't afford to move quickly. You'd be looking at buying a server and managing it yourself.

AWS is really not cheap, it's quite expensive to just 'scale'.

It is good people are supporting them, they really need the money so they can get some servers that will allow better Uptime

For anyone not aware of what we're talking about, Voat aims to be the new home for Reddit users who are upset that Reddit doesn't allow doxxing and kiddie porn. http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/06/...

>Voat aims to be the new home for Reddit users who are upset that Reddit doesn't allow doxxing and kiddie porn.

Shame on you for speading such FUD. Where is kiddie porn on voat ?

"Days later, PayPal — the vendor that Voat was using to process more than $8,000 in donations — froze the site’s account, ruling that it violated PayPal’s policy against “certain sexually oriented materials or services.”

Not five hours later, those “sexually oriented materials” came to light on Voat’s front page: Many of the girls pictured nude in the site’s “jailbait” forum, one user observed, are clearly underage."

I did include a link after the bit you're quoting.

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