Ask HN: How do you prepare for HN traffic?

9 points·pc86··4 comments

There's an article on the front page[1] right now about the horrors of a burst of HN traffic taking down your site. This is a fairly common occurrence. With that in mind, what steps can a person take to mitigate the risk of a visit to the HN page ruining the chance for conversions/signups/visits?

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4847665

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In order to "prepare" for a burst in traffic then you should just adopt a simple scaling strategy:

- If you can serve content static, serve it static. (For example, if you are running a Wordpress site, then there are several Wordpress plugins which make this even easier)

- Use a CDN to offload your static media. I'd recommend using CloudFlare OR even copying your CSS, Images & Javascript to S3 & changing their respective references to their new location.

- Any dyamic content should rely heavily on caching.

I asked a similar question recently, maybe the suggestions there can help:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4637415

Easiest and cheapest thing that comes to mind: sign up for a free Cloudflare account. They will cache your static content and actually speed up the load times of your pages. For $20/mo you get a few more cooler features and SSL if you need it.

If it sounds like I'm trying to sell them, I am. :) I have it on several of my sites, and it works great for me!

do load testing?

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