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Ask HN: What could journey84.com have done to avoid crashing?

1 points by YPCrumble ↗ HN
Last night https://journey84.com site crashed immediately when the Super Bowl ad linked to their site. What infrastructure decisions should they have made to make sure the site not crash?

- Is it even possible to purchase an Amazon EC2 or other cloud instance large enough to handle traffic from the Super Bowl? Which instance would they have needed? - They linked their video to YouTube. Was that the best decision? - What else could they have done to avoid crashing given that they were expecting millions of immediate concurrent visitors?

2 comments

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outlog
given that site is static content, it's more than easy to use something like cloudflare, which afaik even on their free plan will cache it on their global cdn.

(honestly I would consider the possibility of the "crashing" being part of a PR strategy - makes a good story)

YPCrumble
The free tier of cloudflare includes global cdn. Does that mean all they would have had to do is use the free tier and they would have avoided the issue?

Would there have been some kind of cloudflare loading screen if they'd done that? It doesn't make sense that you can do that with cloudflare for free.