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jjoeon Ask HN: How did you grow from 100 to 1,000 users?

Quite a bit more. This is from my jump box:

$ wc -l ~/.ssh/known_hosts 1240 /root/.ssh/known_hosts

jjoeon Ask HN: How did you grow from 100 to 1,000 users?

It's crazy how time flies! Caching dynamic content is definitely tricky. Subsequent releases of the plugin have had WordPress specific VCLs among others. Cachoid has WordPress specific VCL too with a WP plugin so post edits/changes are reflected with immediate purges and cache warm ups via the Cachoid API. But the benefits of caching pages far outweigh the drawbacks. At least for more sites.

jjoeon Ask HN: How did you grow from 100 to 1,000 users?

I did that with the cPanel Varnish plugin [1]. It's Varnish Cache integration for cPanel WHM (duh!). I signed up on several web hosting forums and would volunteer to help when someone posted looking for help with traffic or website performance.

But I'd have to login to each box, spend a good amount of time on the server, understand the business requirements, and then deploy Varnish. It was hugely time consuming but I loved doing this. It was less about bean-counting but rather more about helping. Also progress seemed slow at first because I would gain one user every 2 or 3 days. But word-of-mouth buzz from people I've helped was the thing that moved the chains for me.

The cPanel WHM platform has been moving quite fast over last few years. And so did several things under the hood. I also wanted to build new features that just couldn't be done on cPanel. I felt the project had potential to expand and reach a much larger subset. And that's when I built Cachoid [2].

[1] https://www.unixy.net/varnish

[2] https://www.cachoid.com/

jjoeon Ask HN: What made WordPress so freaking popular?

Of most importance is the fact that it has first mover advantage in the CMS category. Then the fact that it's open source and extensible.

jjoeon Everything Is Broken (2014)

Is it really surprising that the brokenness of the online world resembles its real world counterpart?

jjoeon Ask HN: What do you use for recurring billing?

I had to build a custom billing system for Cachoid too ( https://www.cachoid.com/ ). You definitely need the upfront time to build it from the ground up but it's worth it in the long run. I'm doing monthly recurring with Stripe and one-time also with Stripe and Paypal. And Bitcoin through Stripe.

I found that charging per server/FQDN (one FQDN === one service === one billing item) rather than per user provides more flexibility. But I'm not comfortable with single-homed APIs like Spreedly. What if it gets acquired tomorrow? It isn't something you can replace overnight.

I'd rather have a multi-homed setup with direct relationship with multiple gateways

jjoeon Show HN: Fly – A global load balancer with middleware

It's interesting you're bringing this up. I've been working on a private CDN that one can run on their own infrastructure (currently in closed beta). Is this kind of deployment more appealing now that CF bled sensitive data?

On the other hand I've also built Cachoid ( https://www.cachoid.com/ ), which is somewhat federated like Fly's but for website acceleration and performance for WordPress, Drupal, landing pages etc. We do have the option to spin a dedicated routing layer with Cachoid, which sort of addresses the shared/neighbor bleeding issue CF suffered from.

But I still don't think decentralized is the ultimate answer to security. Although I realize that the impact could be minimized greatly.

jjoeon AMA with YC Partner Aaron Harris on Applying to YC – S17 Deadline Is Tonight

What's keeping YC from accepting more applicants? What's weighing more in your decision: is it the investment or the labor factor? Would your acceptance rate increase if applicants were to forgo the ~$120k? Rephrased: Are there applicants you could have otherwise accepted were they to decline the cash in exchange for taking part in the program and still giving you the ~7% equity?

Thanks

jjoeon Ask HN: What was the biggest challenge in securing your SaaS/service?

Google 2FA, AWS S3 encryption at rest and its integration with the micro services, ModSecurity integration for Varnish, E2EE for SSL/TLS, infrastructure and micro service security, etc.

I had to build this into Cachoid from day one. No funding and no extra help. I think it boils down to putting oneself in another's shoes and ask: would I use this service myself if it was best-effort work?

jjoeon Stealth startup Privacy Labs raises $4M to give consumers control of their data

How timely was this PR considering what happened with CF today[0]. I'm sincerely impressed!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718752

jjoeon Cloudflare Reverse Proxies Are Dumping Uninitialized Memory

Someone just posted how: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13719366

jjoeon Cloudflare Reverse Proxies Are Dumping Uninitialized Memory

From the blog post: "For the avoidance of doubt, Cloudflare customer SSL private keys were not leaked. Cloudflare has always terminated SSL connections through an isolated instance of NGINX that was not affected by this bug."

Is this statement accurate considering Tavis said in his report that: "We fetched a few live samples, and we observed encryption keys, cookies, passwords, chunks of POST data and even HTTPS requests for other major cloudflare-hosted sites from other users."

jjoeon Cloudflare Reverse Proxies Are Dumping Uninitialized Memory

Everyone: change your HN password asap!

jjoeon Deploystack – Curated list of best tools for launching your website

Hi Vhaeraun

This is refreshing, congrats! How do you go about evaluating new tools and/or platforms? I built Cachoid ( https://www.cachoid.com/ ), which is a site-speed as a service platform (Varnish + WAF + scalability) and I'm curious to see if you're interested in this kind of vertical. Would love to chat about this joe@ aforementioned site.

Thanks

jjoeon Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it awesome? 2017 Edition

> I feel like your pricing section should drop the "upgrade" verbiage and instead use something like "buy now", seeing as most of your traffic there will likely be new users. Also, those buttons lead to a login form—I would default to a sign up form, with a link like "Already have an account? Sign in." to reduce friction for new users.

You're right, I didn't see it from that angle. Plus the registeration link would auto login already registered users anyway.

Thanks!

jjoeon Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it awesome? 2017 Edition

I'm working on Cachoid -- a Varnish-as-a-service platform -- https://www.cachoid.com/

Site caching is so underrated I had to do something about it. In fact, I recently announced its first public beta. The one USP is this: you create a Cachoid and it automatically starts caching your site. No need to get into the nitty-gritty details of caching or get your hands dirty. It just works!

The difference between Cachoid and other platforms is that we guarantee memory allocations per Cachoid (Varnish instance container on steroids), which is crucial to achieve speed. A multi-tenant content distribution network doesn't always have a memory-store SLA for its tenants.

More info: https://www.cachoid.com/

Quick overview of its architecture: https://www.cachoid.com/blog/2017/01/15/high-level-architect...

Docs: https://www.cachoid.com/support

jjoeon Ask HN: How to start a business while working a 9-5 coding job?

That's the conundrum! It's not easy. And because you don't want to burn bridges and want to have a clear conscience, work on a vertical to your employer's. This means you'll likely need to spend time learning about a new vertical. But that's OK you're determined and hungry. I've done it. People have done it.

So don't overcomplicate. Build a daily habit for the next few years. And don't bog yourself down with little details and ifs and buts. I started with a $80/mo allocation. Some were able to do it with $0/month.

jjoeon Ask HN: What do you use for site caching?

Browser caching. This is one that I've found developers et al often overlook. It's also the level of caching that can cause the most headaches. But it's the cheapest to implement and cheapest to run so it's definitely worth getting browser caching right first.

Yes this one's tricky. Especially when you update page layout and assets often.

jjoeon Ask HN: What do you use for site caching?

Hi Dave

Do you deploy Varnish on your own server(s)?

jjoeon Git-scm.com status report

This was my thinking and experience when I set out to build Cachoid[0]. There's so much to gain from caching stuff in RAM it should be ubiquitous. The thing is CDNs don't always have the scale to stick all tenants in RAM. Hence the caching to disk.

[0] - https://www.cachoid.com/

jjoeon Show HN: clob, a blog platform for developers

Yes it's definitely a challenging undertaking, which is why no one has come up with such platform.

> One idea I had was to do some form of performance evaluation of each theme/plugin and show a score or impact grade to the user when they are enabling it

This would be good. You can also crowdsource part of that effort if it's time intensive.

* > I know a few people who have had problems with speed with their Wordpress sites, will tell them to check out Cachoid. *

Feel free to pass on my email (joe@). Thanks so much!

jjoeon Ask HN: How do you come up with a Brand or Project Name?

Here's how I came up with mine. I was building a Varnish-as-a-Service platform then. But I didn't want to use the word Varnish in my fqdn because it's a trademark. But also because the sum of its parts is more than Varnish (you've got scaling, security, etc).

So I focused on the essence of the thing I was building, which is caching. I couldn't find any concise domain with the word "caching" in it. So I played around with syllables and settled on Cachoid.com. I'm happy with the outcome so far https://www.cachoid.com/

jjoeon Show HN: clob, a blog platform for developers

There's room for an extensible blog platform like WordPress but with well defined performance safeguards for plugins and themes. WP users never rate plugins or themes based on performance because performance degradation due to plugins or themes is rarely visible to the end user. So they're almost always rated based on functionality.

So if you could somehow build performance-safe extensibility, you could emerge as a solid alternative especially if you continue targeting developers (they spread the word more effeciently.

Anyway, perhaps I'm biased w.r.t performance because I built Cachoid (for WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc) but this could be a niche with interesting growth.

jjoeon Using Immutable Caching to Speed Up the Web

But what happens when you need to cache the actual page not just static resources? That's what the content-addressed resources trick doesn't address.

jjoeon Using Immutable Caching to Speed Up the Web

It's up to the client to decide based on Last-Modified (if previously sent by the server) and its own implementation. But I guess browsers are going to be a tad bit aggressive especially if Last-Modified is absent. Hence the overly aggressive 304s.

jjoeon Using Immutable Caching to Speed Up the Web

Just playing devil's advocate there for a minute. And this is definitely one of those things I've had to work around.

jjoeon Using Immutable Caching to Speed Up the Web

Meant to say that there's no conditional with immutable. Corrected, thanks.

jjoeon Using Immutable Caching to Speed Up the Web

Content-Length MUST be ignored in some cases (encoding). Not all send a Content-Length header (it's a SHOULD not a MUST).

jjoeon Using Immutable Caching to Speed Up the Web

How does validation work in the case of a 200 status and no Content-Length header?

jjoeon Using Immutable Caching to Speed Up the Web

The difference is that in the case of immutable the browser does not send a 304 conditional.