My blog post went to #1 on Hacker News!

On Sunday evening I decided to once and for all kill my Facebook account. But I didn’t want to lose everything so I managed to back up everything.

Instead of just doing that, I decided to document most of the process and do a little blog post about it, just for incase an old friend or acquaintance is looking for me, which they can google me and they’ll probably find this blog and a whole list of updated ways to contact me. And then they’ll know, “Ah, Ronald deleted his account, he didn’t unfriend me.” - no heavy vibes 💝

As with most of my blog posts, for fun, I share it on Hacker News along with Twitter & Reddit. I usually get a few views from it.

However this time was a little bit different.

About 20 minutes after I posted it, I suddenly saw my traffic surging fast and my server slowed down like crazy - but it luckily stayed live.

That’s when it hit me. My blog post is on the front page of Hacker News. OH MY GOSH!

About an hour after I posted it, it received over 3000 hits already.

First it was at #3.

But it quickly got ahead of the rest.

Ahead of Nvidia, Google and NY Times (classic headline though) OH MY GOSH 2.0

And it literally hovered around the top 3 for a few hours, till it started moving down. By the evening it was just over #10. And then it slowly faded away.

I mean, it’s not suppose to be a big deal. It’s not like I got money for it or anything tangible. But, the feeling that I something I posted actually got that much attention by over 11,000 people in a day. That’s quite a cool feeling.

It also gave my servers a good stress test. My blog runs on Ghost, with Sqlite (as opposed to MySQL which they recommend) and it managed to stay up. I think a bit more RAM and CPU would’ve ensured that it stayed fast all the time - but still, it didn’t crash and it just kept serving page requests. At some point I was getting over 50 hits per second. That’s a lot of traffic for a $5 server.

Overall, It was a cool experience! Hopefully something like this happens again - and with one of my projects, or clients’ websites.