Getting hugged to death

john | Nov. 3, 2023, 6:50 a.m. Programming

As you would expect with a website that you launch almost at midnight, since you expect nothing and left it on a two core box.  A two core box is generally enough to support the world of visitors with a solid set up.  Not for this type of hug.  This one came quick and deadly.  To the top it goes.  Not number one, at least not when I checked but close enough, number three.  Because you know, it's a Show HN.

What normally happens is some time goes into making the website.  Hashing out the idea.  Searching for the perfect name.  Procrastinating over why I'm even building this thing.  Then actually building the thing.  To a lackluster result.  Take for example the previous two projects, nothing earth shattering.  Those run on one core boxes, they got maybe a few votes each on Hacker News and that was the end of that. 

Then, I further went and fixed a few things on those projects and added a few things as I got more and more feedback from users, but not on this one.  This one was launched, and to the front it goes.  Hundreds of concurrent visitors.  Gigs and gigs of bandwidth a second.  Uploading, Downloading, Side loading, Who knows what loading.  And every type of loading in between.

So I did the only thing I could.  I resized the box since it was built to take a beating, but not a deluge.  And they waited.  The community actually waited.  Took maybe five to ten minutes.  My site was down, and it just floated there on third position of hacker news, with my comment.  "Resizing box, got hugged. One sec."

Minutes in when the resize was progressing, I updated "Seems to be almost done resizing".

As the eternal minutes dawned, the box came back online, I commented "back up".  And the usual antics followed from the usual characters.  It was glorious.  It was unexpected.  It was what I would expect nothing more or less of.  Thank you, yet again.  Hacker News.