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Ask HN: Got celebrity to tweet about my project...

2 points by oldmanstan ↗ HN
she's going to tweet to her many thousands of followers sometime next week.

It's a PHP/MySQL website hosted on Dreamhost. I've never had to scale, and don't know anything about handling traffic larger than a few people an hour.

How should I prepare for this?

3 comments

[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 16.2 ms ] thread
mgkimsal
turn down ttl on dns to a few mins to allow you to change to another host quickly.
jonah
How many pages/resources can you serve statically or from a CDN?
rosenjon
Move to a host that will allow you to upgrade resources on demand. Shared hosting is a bad place to be if you think you're going to get slammed with traffic.

Either move to a VPS Provider who can scale you up to a dedicated server if necessary (i.e. VPSLink), or go with AWS (Amazon), which basically has unlimited scale, but may also have unlimited cost (at some point, it may be better for your dedicated server to go down than to spend $60,000 in a month on server resources). Of course, this is both a personal and business choice, and really dependent on how much promise you think the site has and whether you can use your traffic stats to raise some money and grow the business.