HN Explorer

13 comments

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htsh
I was surprised to not see Amazon anywhere here...
pinko
It's not clear enough that this is not meant to be comprehensive (lacking Amazon as htsh points out, and noted at the bottom of the graphic) but rather an somewhat arbitrary selection of companies for comparison. (I also personally know of at least two research labs with more servers than some of the boxes in this graphic.)
nicpottier
Not good. Why guess on Google but not Amazon? The ordering also doesn't make much sense. I'm at a loss as to what exactly this does WELL.
jackowayed
I think the ordering was so that they could make the size of the rectangles proportional to the number of servers and not have gaps. And they put Google last so that people didn't have to scroll and scroll and scroll for the rest.
chime
I wish people used tables to display tabular data.
slig
That was pretty well done. It's not like giant pie chart.
goodmitton
I rather it'd be a pie chart or a bar graph so I wouldn't have to scroll up and down the page to compare different companies.
levpopov
As pointed out by folks on Gizmodo, the areas of the rectangles seem to have nothing to do with the number of servers listed inside (for example Intel's square is almost 4x the size of Rackspace, even though the server count is less than 2x).

Also, the numbers for Facebook are quite outdated.

mgcross
It is indeed a confusing 'infographic'. Intel's rect (332,352px) is 100x the size of iWeb's rect (3,192px), but Intel's server count is only listed as 10x that of iWeb. I'd rather see a graphic with a 1:1 ratio of servers to pixels.
albertsun
Probably didn't scale their boxes by area, but by height instead.
ck2
Where is yahoo and bing on there?

I think I saw a better version of this on Pingdom...