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Comment by j_m_b | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

$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'.

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

AFAIK they're on Azure now.

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