Ask HN: Expected Groupon Traffic Volume
Hopefully someone can help me out here. I've been reading HN for a while and never really submitted anything or asked any questions but I seem to be in need of some advice.
I'm a volunteer webmaster for a small non-profit. I've setup the website with Drupal on a small Linode instance. We really have a very small amount of traffic ( 80 - 150 visits per day ) to the website. Some people come through looking at who we are, our history, and specifically, people use it to register for events and classes.
We've been looking to boost attendance to our classes and have ended up somehow being featured on a popular local deals website ( groupon, living social, tippr, etc. ) I'd be less cryptic but since I wasn't involved in the deal making process I really have absolutely no idea how much I'm allowed to say about the upcoming deal.
I'm a professional rails developer and a Drupal novice. I chose Drupal because other board members wanted to edit content and I didn't want to build out a CMS. In hindsight, I really should have gone with Rails. There's something to be said for just doing what you know rather than going with something that is "better" for the job - especially when you don't have a whole lot of time to devote to learning a new technology.
My questions are these:
1) I have no idea how much traffic people generally get from deals like these. Can someone enlighten me?
2) Do any of you php/drupal folks know what I can reliably run off of a small Linode with the increase in site traffic because of this featured deal.
3) I'm considering replacing the entire website with rails site with essentially 3 pages: An about page, A class description / what to expect page, and a registration page. This would be a super focused site and I'm wondering how much success people have had ( especially with respect to local/social deals ) with a 3 page setup like this.