[HN Gopher] When 70M people visit your joke site
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When 70M people visit your joke site
Author : DevilMadeMeDoIT
Score : 203 points
Date : 2021-04-17 07:41 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (warzel.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (warzel.substack.com)
| scubazealous wrote:
| I think its really cool they left a badge at the bottom of the
| site to show regular visitors the traffic through an analytics
| site.
| https://simpleanalytics.com/istheshipstillstuck.com?utm_sour...
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| I like that he's honest about getting obsessed by it, and feeling
| down after the attention was gone. He could've easily played it
| down claiming it was just for shits and giggles and didn't mean
| anything. "I'll never make anything again in my life that reaches
| 70M people" must take a while to sink in.
| cyberlab wrote:
| > "I'll never make anything again in my life that reaches 70M
| people" must take a while to sink in.
|
| There's people that have turned single serving sites[0] into a
| sport and probably enjoy even wilder success than the stuck
| ship site. There's a tonne of sites like this here:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/
|
| It's not hard to get something going viral anyway. Just make
| the topic related to something recent in the news, cobble
| together some basic HTML, purchase a domain, then get
| 'influencer' type accounts on Twitter to retweet your link and
| ask a few journos to write an article about it and you're off.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-serving_site
| Uehreka wrote:
| One does not simply "get 'influencer' type accounts on
| Twitter to retweet your link and ask a few journos to write
| an article about it". These people are all receiving tons of
| requests from everyone who is trying to promote anything.
| You're right that everything before that is super easy, but
| that part right there is the filter function.
| tuwtuwtuwtuw wrote:
| Can't view that reddit page without logging on or using their
| app. How ironic.
| namrog84 wrote:
| Are you on phone or pc. I could view it fine on phone and
| pc in browser without app and without an account. Not sure
| if familiar with reddit but definitely don't need account
| or app.
| tuwtuwtuwtuw wrote:
| I'm on phone and very very familiar with reddit (as in: I
| enjoy it a bit too much for my own good) . When I visited
| the link I got the following message:
|
| > To view posts in r/InternetIsBeautiful you must
| continue in Reddit app or log in.
|
| These are per-subreddit rules I assume. Other subreddits
| works fine on phone without logging on.
|
| Edit: Here is some thread about it: https://www.reddit.co
| m/r/ModSupport/comments/epsv9m/apparent...
|
| So it appears to be dependent on my location as well. Not
| my cup of "internet is beautiful".
| kbenson wrote:
| It's weird that this "experiment" as the reddit admin
| called it is still going in over a year later. I wonder
| if the subreddit mods requested it or have no say in it
| or what.
| oneweekwonder wrote:
| i could access it using old.reddit.com[0] or if you are on
| mobile reddit.premii.com[1] also seems to work.
|
| [0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/ [1]:
| https://reddit.premii.com/#/r/InternetIsBeautiful/
| lc9er wrote:
| That's a bit "How to Draw an Owl".
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| I guess he has come to accept that ship has sailed.
| [deleted]
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| Well done, bravo! how does it feel to know you've made the
| best and most well timed joke you'll ever make?
| extrememacaroni wrote:
| Ah yes, yours must be the snarkiest reply ever given.
| tuwtuwtuwtuw wrote:
| I interpreted it as a reference to the feelings of OP.
| Don't think it was intended as snarky? Maybe my snark
| detector is broken, English is secondary language for me.
| bemmu wrote:
| Experiencing this just once creates a strong desire
| (addiction?) to make something popular online again. It's just
| really interesting to tweak these things and follow their
| growth (and have sleepless nights when things go wrong).
| NDizzle wrote:
| Good work. Reminds me of one of my old favorites,
| http://iscaliforniaonfire.com/
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| I was always annoyed that it didn't show _where_ California was
| on fire, but then I discovered this.
| http://whereiscaliforniaonfire.com
| bckr wrote:
| Hmm, seems it hasn't been updated because California is not on
| fire right now.
| goatsi wrote:
| With a state as large as California, some part of it is
| almost always on fire:
| https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents/2021/4/5/springs-fire/
| gewoonkris wrote:
| Or this one from when the LHC came online:
| http://www.hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com...
| donalhunt wrote:
| Technically it's still stuck (in Egypt) until the owners pay the
| fine / settle.
| krychu wrote:
| Technically, we're all stuck in the solar system.
| lukeramsden wrote:
| On the bright side if there is ever a large ship-getting-stuck-
| event he's already in position. Maybe the next one could be a
| spaceship.
| paulpauper wrote:
| too bad elon musk or someone else who is famous didn't make a big
| donation or bid for the NFT.
| polote wrote:
| related https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26645813 | Inside a
| viral website
| gennarro wrote:
| Yes the articles were quite similar! I thought I had read this
| new one already, but site author had just done his own article
| first.
| ttty wrote:
| The ship became stuck in the middle of the English Channel on
| Sunday afternoon. The ship was re-stuck for hours, drawing
| millions of viewers to the site to watch a live stream of the
| event. That's it.
| samus wrote:
| Are you running a bot? In other threads, your comments seem to
| be summaries of TA.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| not adding anything new to the story really -- plenty of
| discussion and info in the post from the original guy:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26645813
| distantsounds wrote:
| "I checked the server logs and saw the traffic and was like,
| 'holy shit. this might cost me a lot of money to run this
| thing.'"
|
| excuse me? running a (mostly) static site that just makes API
| calls to third parties is costing you lots of money?
|
| i swear, everyone's obsession with running things on per-instance
| resources that charge fractions of a cent that add up
| astronomically. run this on a $5/mo VPS in ovhcloud and save
| yourself the headache.
| tomjohnneill wrote:
| Part of my worry was that I messed up the caching initially so
| it was making API calls on the server for each request. Once I
| fixed that, there wasn't really anything to worry about.
| 0goel0 wrote:
| Your comment history makes me worry for you. If you don't
| already, do therapy. Times are hard, take care of yourself.
| domano wrote:
| 70M visitors is a lot of traffic, no matter how you host it.
| Assuming we are talking about 1MB per visit then that is
| roughly 70TB. At least my VPS in germany does have a traffic
| limit. Also he did statically host it on vercel if i remember
| correctly.
| tomjohnneill wrote:
| Yeah it was statically hosted in the end (initially it wasn't
| quite static). When it was at its most popular, the total
| site size including JavaScript was around 70kb as far as I
| can remember, so it didn't come anywhere near as high as
| 70TB.
| progval wrote:
| > Assuming we are talking about 1MB per visit then that is
| roughly 70TB.
|
| If you visit the site today with scripts blocked, the site
| still works and the page is only 160kB, including 140kB of
| images of book covers. And the "I checked the server logs and
| saw the traffic" part of the story happened before they added
| these ads (see https://notfunatparties.substack.com/p/inside-
| a-viral-websit... for a better timeline)
| ZWoz wrote:
| If you have hobby site, then failing action "going dark" is
| better than "going cost 1000 times more".
| Fern_Blossom wrote:
| I'm going to fully agree to this. There's a huge obsession with
| bloated pages for the sake of bloat at that. Somehow they're
| using it as an excuse to why they need the whole per-instance
| cloud setup when, as you said, a $5 (cheeseburger-meal) priced
| a month VPS would do the equivalent job. Maybe you'd have to
| pay 2 or 3 cheeseburgers a month to upgrade when things get
| heavy... if you setup your site correctly.
|
| Don't get me wrong either, I thought the site was awesome and
| visited it often during that week. Reading the post-mortem of
| it was super cool too... until I read how the site was
| developed. I get the idea of a practicing small sites with a
| framework of choice. You _need_ to practice, especially in a
| real world environment. Nothing wrong there. But the site could
| have been made in strict HTML and CSS, by hand, and called it a
| day. No one would know the difference. It was a super simple,
| basic site. There was zero special in it that needed anything
| more than that. Sure, maybe something was going on the
| background, but if that ended up not being useful for the dev,
| it was surely a zero value addon for the user. A lot of these
| frameworks are the equivalent of hiring a semi-truck with a 53
| foot trailer to move a couch across town. Yes, it works. Yes,
| there are potential benefits _if_ something were to pop-up.
| But, a small city van or pick-up truck would have gotten the
| job done easier, cheaper, and faster. 99.9% of the time, that
| 's all you need. If you're moving a couch, the likelihood of
| you needing the extra space because someone calling you up to
| move pallets worth of stuff is minimal. Same goes with small,
| single purpose sites. Basing everything on that 00.1% chance is
| pretty silly.
|
| War and Peace (the book) in simple text is roughly 900kb from
| Project Gutenberg if I remember correctly. That's how many
| hours of reading? 587,000 word count. Average adult reading
| speed is about 200 words a minute. 2,935 minutes or 48.9 hours
| of reading. 2 days worth of constant reading. Minus pictures
| and videos, when you traverse the web, how many pages require
| more than a mb worth of data for providing 10 minutes worth of
| reading content? Twitter is probably the ultimate champion in
| bloat for mb to read time ratio. Design and styling is one
| thing that people are going to use as some excuse for the
| bloat. But with all the people that use HN, don't piss in my
| pocket. Overly graphic designs aren't needed for conveying
| content well. I hope I don't have to get into how all the
| background tracking needs to go straight to the same ring of
| hell that holds people who kick puppies and kittens.
|
| I remember a day when programmers valued themselves in being
| efficient in delivery. Oh, the good ol'days. Now get off my
| lawn!
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| I think you're being a tad unfair here. I've been a web dev of
| sorts for 15 years and to be honest even on my current provider
| I'd have no idea how much this "could" cost me if it got
| popular, I'd have exactly the same concerns regardless of the
| tech involved. Given it was a personal joke site there's a
| chance PS200 is "a lot of money" for him.
| leokennis wrote:
| I pay EUR7,25/month for 10 GB of space and unlimited traffic.
| It's probably far from the best deal out there.
| ripper1138 wrote:
| I always thought it was ridiculous that my old company
| marketed the product as being capable of "infinite scale".
| Words like unlimited and infinite have no meaning anymore.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| How soon after your site becomes popular do you find the
| definition of "unlimited traffic" your host is running on
| differs from yours? Is be amazed if they didn't throttle it
| at all.
| sumedh wrote:
| What kind of hosting are we talking here. Can a $5 VPS box handle
| this much traffic?
| freedomben wrote:
| Yes, a simple static website served with nginx on a $5 rig can
| handle absolutely absurd amounts of traffic. I've done it.
|
| Stick a free cloudflare plan in front of it with caching
| enabled, and you'll be amazed.
| arlk wrote:
| You don't even need a VPS. A static website with no user input
| better be hosted on Vercel or Netlify, with Cloudflare as a
| CDN.
| sofixa wrote:
| No need for Cloudflare, Vercel or Netlify already have CDNs.
|
| Another option is Cloudflare themselves, with Cloudflare
| Pages.
|
| There's also Firebase, and good old S3+Cloudfront.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| I just launched something with AWS Amplify, which is
| automatic S3+Cloudfront. Insanely easy. Just link a repo.
| sofixa wrote:
| Vercel, Netlify and Cloudflare Pages are the same, just
| link a repo
| 0goel0 wrote:
| How much would it cost, assuming 70m visitors and various
| page sizes (100k to 1m)?
| travisjungroth wrote:
| Oh, actually a shitload. Data out is $0.15 per GB. 70m at
| 1mb is $10k. Straight S3 is $80, if I used the calculator
| right.
| nomad225 wrote:
| Could Github Pages work too?
| arlk wrote:
| I don't see any reason why it couldn't.
| sunsipples wrote:
| sell it as an nft.
|
| nft is 2020/21's monorail.
| sebdufbeau wrote:
| They did:
|
| https://opensea.io/assets/0x495f947276749ce646f68ac8c2484200...
| fouc wrote:
| It would be cool if he tracks Ever Given for the rest of its
| natural life.
| LordOfWolves wrote:
| I'd love to learn about the financials. How much did everything
| cost? Was it worth it?* How does one reason with the expenditure?
|
| *I do understand that Tom Neill created this while bored at home.
| I also understand that if created via modern methods, this
| project could have cost him next to nothing, and thus only
| benefits awaited him. I'd love to learn more.
| tomjohnneill wrote:
| I wrote that up here:
| https://notfunatparties.substack.com/p/inside-a-viral-websit...
| macintux wrote:
| Just wanted to say thanks: you did indeed break the news for
| me, anyway, despite my near-obsession with monitoring Twitter
| that week.
| LordOfWolves wrote:
| Thanks Tom, nothing better than hearing directly from you
| regarding this.
| amelius wrote:
| Curious that he used "www.istheshipstillstuck.com" as the domain
| name, and "Is that ship still stuck?" for the title of the page
| ("the" versus "that").
|
| And interestingly, there is a completely different website at:
| https://www.isthatshipstillstuck.com/
| tomjohnneill wrote:
| It was basically a typo, but then enough people got slightly
| irritated by it that I started to enjoy having it that way.
| dmos62 wrote:
| When you say the address and the title one after the other it
| kind of sounds better when there's a small difference.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Followup : Please Leave My Ship Alone : What happens when 70M
| people visit the article you made about 70M people visiting your
| joke site?
| jb775 wrote:
| What he able to monetize the site at all? Didn't see anything in
| the article besides him posting a few links that increased
| certain book sales. If he managed to get a penny for each viewer,
| he would have made $700k.
|
| If not, I'm curious how anyone would best leverage a temporary &
| massive surge of eyeballs for the highest monetization?
| kbenson wrote:
| I don't think anyone makes a penny per viewer for non paid
| sites.
| tempestn wrote:
| 1c per viewer would be $10CPM. Some sites definitely do make
| that, but it would generally take time and effort to get
| there; you wouldn't do it by just dropping some adsense ads
| in.
| walrus01 wrote:
| > The hosting company I was working with said at its peak 7,500
| people were coming per second. Just ridiculous. There were two
| peaks -- when people first heard about it and then when it was
| getting unstuck. There were at least 3 million people during the
| unstuck period. I got told by hosting company that the site got
| 70 million hits in total. I'm still getting between 1,000 and
| 2,000 people a day, even now.
|
| I wonder what this would look like on a day and week scale
| network traffic graph, in Mbps
| mimac wrote:
| I use the site to get to the ship tracking site as it's easier
| to remember. Also learned there is live ship tracking info
| available!
|
| Fascinating!
| Tenoke wrote:
| I'm guessing a site like that is on the order of 1mb per visit
| so my guess would be within an order of magnitude of 100 TB
| total, 7.5gb/s at peak. Depends a lot on caching etc of course.
| CodesInChaos wrote:
| The page appears to have 265kB first party content.
|
| 265kB * 7500/s = 2GB/s = 16Gbit/s
| tomjohnneill wrote:
| It was a static site cached on Vercel. Not including the map
| (which is an iframe) the site was less than 100kb.
| krychu wrote:
| I thought his honesty was heartwarming, and also the ability to
| accurately retrospect on his emotions.
| andygcook wrote:
| Here's a link to the original makers own account of running the
| site: https://notfunatparties.substack.com/p/inside-a-viral-
| websit...
| chubot wrote:
| Discussed a couple weeks ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26645813
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(page generated 2021-04-17 23:01 UTC)