Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?

Sites like this typically see eCPM between $0.10 and $0.30 for advertising. So you're looking at around $30/day revenue right now.

Consider switching to EC2. This will allow you to easily scale up to a more powerful server if growth continues or down to a less powerful one if traffic tapers off.

Depending on how you set things up, a common bottleneck for Facebook applications is API calls. Ensure you are not making any API calls from Rails, since this will cause Rails processes to hang until Facebook returns results. With high traffic this could easily cause your server to become overwhelmed. Move all API calls to Delayed Job or another background processing system if you haven't already.

It looks like you have relatively few remotely loaded assets, which is great. You can likely speed things up more by making sure that your database is well optimized for the server (Make sure query cache is enabled, and you have indexes on the right columns for example), and identify any actions that take a long time to return.

As for what to expect in the future, growth will not be infinite. There are a finite number of people on earth that are going to love your site and Facebook integration is a fantastic way to reach nearly all of those people in a very short amount of time. After a while most of those people will get bored and you will see traffic begin to fall. The best ways to address this are by consistently releasing new features to reengage users or by referring your users to other similar sites that you build.

Without knowing more about your setup I'd offload assets to S3 and switch from Passenger to Unicorn.

I suggest migrating it to Heroku. Push your code, copy over the database, and crank your dynos up. They charge by the hour, so as an example if you have ~10 dynos running (roughly equivalent to 10 thin instances, but slightly better) for 5 days (or however long it takes for the initial traffic surge to subside), you're only going to pay about $50. Then, you can turn down your dyno count and pay a reasonable monthly fee.

Think about moving the code over to Heroku now, and keep scaling to meet demand.

If you don't have the cash, email me and I'll front you what you need to keep it up until you figure out how you want to roll with this. This is not a time to trip over pennies.

Congratulations.

Edit: Google Cache got it: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sclient=psy&...

I was able to sign up and see just enough to get a feel before the site became unresponsive. I like that it's dead simple. I can also see how it's incredibly viral as it asks you to ask others to describe you -- very smart. At first glance it looks to me like something that could enjoy tons of traffic, but which would probably be short-lived. The challenge would be finding a way to have that traffic stick around...

I view this as a bit of a long shot, but I would do a few things. First, you've got to have the site handle the traffic. No advice on how, but find a way to get that done. Next, I would try to become known as the place to get a quick summary on anybody -- even celebrities. I imagine people will receive multiple adjectives from different people, but I'd have the site tally the three most popular and promote those as best describing of the user. :) I see a couple of possible pages for "viewer stickiness". The homepage could feature very popular users. Imagine showing the three most submitted words to describe /paulg or /marrington and other users with large responses... Next, on each user's page it could show their "friends" and the words that describe them. The site also provides the most recently submitted three words on the user's page. This might at least make each user curious about checking back at their own profile to see how people were labeling them. As for monetizing, that's probably with ads, as usual, but you have to be careful about when and where to put them. Like I said, probably a long shot, but who knows? Good luck!

1. Implement caching. 2. Get faster servers to handle your 'debutant' phase' ex: EC2 3. bask in limelight, enjoy!

long term: app engine (just port it to webapp framework)

threewords for threewords.me: hot new cool

thats how i survived a mini fb app thatwent from zero to 44 million users in 7 days... rackspace cloud + memcache + redis insert&update queue + round robin. after a month i even killed the rackspace cloud interface and api with over 80 nodes and growing. had to get the memory limit on my account raised twice. peak were around 40k req/sec. after the second month we moved it to four bulky servers (16 core, raid5, 32gb ram) each cost around 12k dollar.

the whole secret is caching. everything, everywhere and as much as possible.

1. Upgrade your linode to something around 2 Gig for now.

2. Start playing with your MySQL or Postgresql config (assuming you're not already using redis or something similar, in which case just throw more RAM at the box). Google performance settings for your DB of choice and look for relevant posts to the memory you have.

3. If there's anything cachable, install memcached and implement it.

4. Purchase a second linode and move your database to it.

5. Upgrade each VPS as needed.

6. At this point you get into fancy scaling and there are loads of options. You should have plenty of breathing room by this point though and can plan it out.

Maybe in put down your follow ideas in short little phrases and have people provide three words on that, if they wish, along with three words on their friends. It will give you great insight into what THIS audience thinks is a good or bad next step for you.

This is a site that will not maintain interest as it is beyond a short period unless you add more to it. So the key here is to move forward quickly, even if it is in tiny incremental steps. letting the users help you make some of those choices of what steps to take can only help.

Hi there, your home page is very simple, render it in plain HTML and post the signup to queue.php.

In queue.php put:

<?php $data = serialize($_POST); mysql_connect('localhost','dbuser','dbpass'); mysql_select_db('dbname'); mysql_query('INSERT INTO cache(cache_data) VALUES(\''.mysql_real_escape_string($data).'\')'); echo 'YOUR REAL PAGE SHOULD BE HERE WITH A MESSAGE ABOUT BEING IN THE QUEUE'; ?>

The cache table should just be a PK cache_id and a text field (or perhaps mediumtext). I've suggested using a database instead of a filesystem based cache because, if you're doing this quickly, doing it using MySQL means you're less likely to run into file permissions or security problems.

Then you're at least capturing everyone's information whilst you figure out how to scale.