Ask HN: How many users should you plan for when launching?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4096689

by youngdev • 14 years ago

1 3 14 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

We are going to launch in about 2 weeks. We are currently using Virtual Shared hosting and it has been working great when we run performance tests using few hundred users (<300). We start to see problems when we crank the numbers up to 1000 users at 5-10 second intervals.

Just curious how many users should we plan for when launching. Also, is it too early to move to dedicated server or stick with virtual share hosting?

vladd2• 14 years ago

Some general advice / what I would do, without knowing too much specifics about your situation:

If you're in Europe, take a www.Hetzner.de/en dedicated server, 49 EUR/month is a small fee to pay to avoid embarrassment on the launch day.

If you're in US, try to use one of the high-end Amazon EC2's boxes as a dedicated server on launch day. Don't buy many of them, just 1, don't code scalability, don't be trapped in proprietary APIs, just rent a medium-to-high-end EC2 box for launch day. It's peanuts to have it for 24 hours, just use it as your launch-day dedicated server. You can see afterwards what happens with the traffic and adapt.

Having said that, be careful with configuration and stuff like that. Most of the bottle-necks are with limits set too low or too high (too few MySQL connections, too many Apache workers that swap the box to the death and so on). If you tweak them right, 90% of the preparation is done.

Be proactive, be available, logged in, monitor the service latency's periodically on launch day and good luck!

youngdev• 14 years ago

Vladd, thanks for the suggestion. I'll definitely look ito Amazon EC2. I did not know that you could rent it for a day.

vladd2• 14 years ago

Yeah, their prices are actually per hour :-).

The instance types are at http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/ (you probably want Medium or Large)

The hourly prices are at http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ (you want the "On-Demand" section)

Ask HN: How many users should you plan for when launching?

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