Ask HN: How much traffic to expect if your project hits HN front page?

I submitted a pet-project called ngProgress[0], a progressbar provider for AngularJS. It's not a project per se, more a smaller library I decided to share here. It was on the frontpage for almost one day and on the second page for a day as well. I got about 10'000 visits during the first day and about half, 5000 during the second day. This also includes shares on Twitter that came after posting it here.

Most people just opened the page and closed it within ten seconds. The second largest group had the page opened for about one minute before closing. Please note the landing page for ngProgress[1] is very simple though and has almost no engagement except demo for the library.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6250112

[1] - http://victorbjelkholm.github.io/ngProgress/

Unless it goes viral outside of HN, based on my experience of a few front page hits, you can get 10K-50K visitors. As most of visitors will bounce, serve a static landing page and you can handle the traffic easily with a single server

I agree ~10,000 visits for a standard front page story, with ~200 simultaneous visitors.

10-20k total if it doesn't go viral outside of HN. Maybe 100-200 concurrent at peak. Don't worry about your server, unless it's a box at your home it should handle the traffic...

I had a project that was number 3 on the front page for a good part of a Saturday.

I had 7500 unique visitors from HN including the traffic coming from linkbots that re-serve HN links.

With a single node.js (express) app on an EC2 medium instance and I was fine. I got about 10% conversion rate. It was a game with a signup page that required you to register first.

The single instance held up the static content and the app itself for a while. In hindsight I should have used an nginx reverse proxy for the homepage.

--EDIT-- here is the post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7364927

--EDIT2-- changed conversion rate typo from 1% to 10%

We've had a couple of blog posts hit #1. From memory, we received around 35,000 visitors on each occasion, spaced over the course of several hours.

About 10 to 20,000 in my experience for a site that's on the front page for about a day.

I also saw ~7000 visits first day but that was in 2012. Here are some conclusions of my web traffic analysis:

https://github.com/entaroadun/hnpickup/wiki/Hacker-News-Pick...

Here are multiple screen shots of the google web traffic analytics interface:

http://hnpickup.appspot.com/hnpickup_web_app_statistics_snap...

Apparently, more than GrandArmy can handle with this USPS redesign post...

I've gotten as much as 60,000 in 24 hours if it stays on the front page. Recently I had one that hit 4000 in about 20 minutes but some circuit breaker hit (which I have no clue about, not really controversial or anything) and it dropped instantly to page 5 so the traffic died quickly. Generally at the top you might see as much as 10/s peak. I've seen 500+ concurrent but of course that is based on whatever Google considers concurrent.

Never had any trouble serving it (my own code, LAMP, on Amazon micro instance). programmer.reddit.com is a little lighter. Ancillary traffic (other sites) from a front page post might add 10% or so over time.

I've got my project on the front page #20, it led to 500 visitors in 3 hours. Not a huge success i would say :) The interesting question is how much _conversion_ to expect.

When a few readers collectively had the poor judgement to vote a post I wrote to the front page it brought in around 12k uniques from HN and associated parasitic sites over the space of 6 hours or so. This was peaking around 200 - 250 simultaneous visitors.

If I recall correctly, I seemed to top out around 300 visitors per minute. Load stayed close to that for about 2 days (dunno about US evening hours)

Happened to me a few times (for technical articles/code). If I recall correctly it was around 3000-7000 unique visitors. My site is hosted on Github pages so I didn't have to worry about the load.

I submitted a blog post a while back that made it to the front page and it hit about 11,000 visitors from HN and ancillary HN feed sites alone in 6-8 hours. The traffic was elevated for the next couple weeks and even my website, which was barely linked from the blog, saw a 50-60% increase in traffic lasting about a week after the post. I still saw traffic from this spike up to a full month later.

The link to my data visualization was on front page for ~8 hours. I got 10K hits first day, 2500 second day, 400 third day. The post was not specifically pimping my side project, but was a visualization of Seed Funding. That being said we had about 500 people from HN request beta access.

link: https://www.machete.io/board/view/seed_db_funding_rounds/157...

If you want to track visits from HN, MAKE SURE YOU ENABLE HTTPS BY DEFAULT AND LINK TO AN HTTPS LINK. It is in the http spec that no referrer info is passes from an https site (like HN) to an http site.

One last bit - we are hosted on a small Azure instance, we used loader.io to test what kind of a load we could handle and it shit out pretty quickly. We implemented some output caching and it handled the HN flood just fine (200-300 concurrent users).

Been on the frontpage a few times, mostly weekends. 2/3 days got me 30,000 to 60,000 hits/day (24h) per time. My website is static, optimized and hosted on a cluster of geo-spread nodes so they were still doing nothing, the statistics server (piwik) did have a load of 4 at peak...

My total hits on / of when PDFy hit the frontpage (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8034431), and remained there for some 24 hours, iirc:

    root@debian:/var/log/lighttpd/pdf.cryto.net# cat access.log | grep "GET / " | grep "news.ycombinator.com" | wc -l
    19387

That said, the Hacker News post led to a bunch of other places writing about it a day or so later, the most notable of which was Gigazine:

    root@debian:/var/log/lighttpd/pdf.cryto.net# cat access.log | grep "GET / " | grep "gigazine.net" | wc -l
    544

But most of their traffic came from the document viewer they embedded in their article:

    root@debian:/var/log/lighttpd/pdf.cryto.net# cat access.log | grep "GET /d/C8gHjDOxTLdunq1a/embed" | grep "gigazine.net" | wc -l
    41609

And this is what the bandwidth usage looked like during those few days:

    root@debian:/var/log/lighttpd/pdf.cryto.net# vnstat -d

    eth0  /  daily

         day         rx      |     tx      |    total    |   avg. rate
     ------------------------+-------------+-------------+---------------
      [...]
      07/13/14    767.19 MiB |  949.01 MiB |    1.68 GiB |  162.72 kbit/s
      07/14/14      1.27 GiB |    9.13 GiB |   10.40 GiB |    1.01 Mbit/s
      07/15/14      7.05 GiB |  106.73 GiB |  113.79 GiB |   11.05 Mbit/s
      07/16/14      2.89 GiB |   48.73 GiB |   51.62 GiB |    5.01 Mbit/s
      07/17/14      2.22 GiB |   24.21 GiB |   26.43 GiB |    2.57 Mbit/s
      07/18/14      1.23 GiB |   11.90 GiB |   13.13 GiB |    1.27 Mbit/s
      07/19/14      1.31 GiB |   11.88 GiB |   13.19 GiB |    1.28 Mbit/s
      07/20/14      1.38 GiB |    7.73 GiB |    9.11 GiB |  884.50 kbit/s
      07/21/14      1.44 GiB |    9.55 GiB |   10.99 GiB |    1.07 Mbit/s
      [...]

If I recall correctly, my HTTPd was hit with some 50-100 reqs/sec total (for static + dynamic). It didn't really have any issues with it, despite running on a cheap VPS with 512MB of RAM, on a non-optimal stack (lighttpd + PHP + MySQL).

I've noticed a significant increase of recurring traffic since (it still hovers at about 5-15GB of traffic a day as opposed to the 2GB before, and there's a steady stream of uploads).

As long as you don't run something obscenely heavy like WordPress or Joomla, and you don't use Apache, you'll probably be fine.

    server.max-fds = 2048

My post [1] made it to #8 on the front page last week and stayed there about 5 hours. I haven't made proper analysis yet, but here are rough numbers. The page got ~3500 visits, most of which within the first 24 hours. Most concurrent users was ~80. The first 24 hours got the linked app ~500 downloads, so that would give a pretty good conversion rate. I don't have data on how much of that came through the website or HN, though.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8070131

I got ~26k from 12 hours as number 2.

I've had a few posts hit the front page over the last couple of years. I had between 5,000 and 10,000 unique visitors (as Google Analytics defines them) over the following 24hrs for each post.

A blog article of mine (hosted on Squarespace) was on the top of the frontpage for most of a day back in January and received approx 25,000 pageviews.

(And also, incidentally, 42 article comments and counting, without a single nasty/sarky/snarky one.)

The same article has since received 500 Facebook likes and was tweeted around 360 times.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7075537 | 334 points