BETTER SOLUTION: Get on the cloud. 15 minutes to upgrade your server when load gets high and billed by the hour at the ram level you're 'using. Theres very little reason to stay on traditional hosting if you're running anything close to a serious startup.
While the cloud does enable you to scale your resources on demand, you still have to address the same issues I had to deal with (how to efficiently use those resources). Plus, moving to a mutli-server setup involves additional complexity in the architecture of the system, which I'd rather not mess with unless I have to :)
Multi-server? Nope, single. Same as you have now, just with added flexibility on ram with 2 clicks I can handle a huge server load with ease, then drop back when done. That way I don't waste time on low level optimization tasks and can keep to what I do best. Building things.
Seriously, there's no reason to stay on a traditional style server setup and you'll never go back once you've tried it. It can be pricey once you ramp up, but give it a shot as you can literally pay by the hour while you play.
Hmm, didn't know you could throw ram at it without adding servers/bouncing the box. Very cool :)
Still, I think there's value in figuring out this stuff by investigating efficiency gains. If I was having to do real tricky stuff (which would probably be beyond my expertise) then the cloud would make more sense for me.
I was on EC2+apache+wordpress+mysql and had my blog go down as well after being featured on HN. In my case, simply rebooting the cloud instance fixed the problem (I had lots of other old projects running on the same instance). However, I did do some research into figuring out what I could have done as my blog kept getting more traffic ... had I used RDS, I could have gone to a bigger instance with little downtime. Unfortunately, my understanding is that there would be no way to go back down to a smaller RDS instance.
P.S. I upvoted you. I also don't get why people downvoted you.
Low-level optimization can be fun though. If you always have the convenience of "throwing hardware" at the solution, you may not be forced into learning something cool, like nginx or properly configuring caching.
From the site: "Each time a subscriber opens an email sent with Campaign Monitor, we keep track of which email client they're using"
Maybe hotmail and yahoo users are more likely to open borderline spam whereas gmail users like to use email as more of a tool to get things done? Be sure to always read between the line before making strong inferences from pretty pie charts.
As an aside, have any of those inspiration struck domains ever paid off or been developed further? I ask because I've registered about 50 of them over the last 3 and a half years and after a good nights sleep the fire has usually died down and they languish in my account until expiry...
Hi Jason, nice site and congrats on the numbers. I consider the design community to be tightly knit, and it seems you've tapped it well from your viral conversion numbers. How do you see this business scaling up and avoiding a ceiling in the near future once you saturate on that design community?
We agree that the social nature of the design community has really helped spur our growth. Our viral coefficient is off the charts for an e-commerce site. A lot of that has to do with people loving to share their latest design inspiration/find.
We think this will scale up nicely because everyone aspires to have good design. Not everyone is a design junky but everyone likes to have some design in their life. Apple is a great example of a brand that has capitalized on that. Also Target, Ikea, etc.
For many, design is a lifestyle. That will always be our core audience. But for the mass consumer, making design objects approachable and affordable is a huge market.
Did Noah know the word Bitch would set her off? How about other words which are commonplace, which would she feel insulted by? We don't know. And I think it is for this added uncertainty to a team that he was referring to rather than the specific term "bitch" which is, of course, commonly considered offensive in a workplace, particularly in direct reference to a known individual.
I'm with the other guy on this one. I want to live in a free society, where no one attempts to enforce some artificial moral code on what I can or can not say. Don't like it, leave.
Enough people like Noah to get him a sizable fan base and enjoy his humor.
It DOES tend to be women who create artificial PC rules, and I would argue that is one of the reasons they are underrepresented within startup ups, given the traditional lack of sophisticated social skills of the (usually male) engineers. It would ruin the dynamic of a good team to have a PC woman "watching their every word" for perceived slights.
> I'm with the other guy on this one. I want to live
> in a free society, where no one attempts to enforce
> some artificial moral code on what I can or can not
> say. Don't like it, leave.
I'm sorry, but it doesn't seem like you understand how human society currently works. In a 'free society,' if a majority of people think you are an asshole, they are going to treat you like one. If you don't want to be treated like an asshole, you'll have to adjust your behavior. Technically, this is forcing you to self-censor yourself, but it's a hell of a lot better than state-censorship or even organizational-censorship. I'd be curious how you would approach eliminating this sort of 'censorship.' So far as I can tell, it would impose the idea on other people that they can't think or act the way they want to just so that 'you' can feel comfortable walking around acting like an ass (and living in a fantasy where you believe that no one thinks you're an ass).
> In a 'free society,' if a majority of people think you are an asshole, they are going to treat you like one.
True, but the majority isn't guaranteed to be right according to your personal moral compass. Your statement would stay just as true if you replaced "asshole" with "gay" or "nigger", but you'd probably draw different conclusions from it, no?
Most definitions of 'asshole' reference something that can be changed rather than something that you are. Restricting people based on being 'gay' or a 'nigger' is based around identity, which is not something easily changed. A black person can't become a white person, but an asshole can change their point of view and/or hold their tongue.
The majority of people did not think he was an asshole. What we have here is one citizen attempting to censor another by influencing public opinion based upon her own beliefs and biases. And of course, white knights of the world will agree. That does not make a "majority", far from it, although it appears so since they are most vocal in support.
Your comment was more general than this specific instance, and I treated it as such. You can't make a general comment, and then try to seamlessly reduce the scope when you realize that you made too general of a comment.
I shouldn't but I can. And that, is what freedom of speech is all about.
If she didn't like it, she should have left. She didn't leave, she had a temper tantrum. To save face, she then made that blog post. She wanted to share her side of the story, irrespective of its merits. And she knew, just as well as we all do, that the internet White Knights will assemble to her cause, also irrespective of its merits. And they have. Now let us not waste anymore time discussing this triviality.
What does this even mean? Does it simply mean "a man who disagrees with me when a woman is being discussed"? That's an interesting way to dismiss an argument without requiring yourself to think about it thoroughly.
'white knights' is a 4chan term. It originated on /b/ when women/girls would show post nude/revealing pictures of themselves, and then Anonymous (presumably male) posters would attempt to 'dox' them (hack their accounts; email their friends/family/school with the nude photos; etc). The 'white knights' were the guys that would defend them (e.g. warn them if they didn't know their images were on 4chan; login to a hacked account, change the password, and notify the owner so that other anonymous posters couldn't continue to 'have fun' with the account; etc). The stereotypical portrayal of internet 'white knights' are lonely geeks that can't get women who think that by defending them on the internet they might get laid (or at least a date/a kiss/etc). Obviously the stereotype is most likely far from the truth, and there's probably some overlap between what /b/ users call 'moral fags' and 'white knights.' Note, that the 'white knight' label is usually only used when someone of unknown gender (which is assumed to be male) is helping out someone that is known to be a female. I don't think the 'white knight' label would ever be applied to someone helping out a target that was known to be male.
edit: There's probably something on Know You Meme and/or Encyclopedia Dramatica about this that may (or may not) be more authoritative.
Thanks for the write up! The less time I spend looking at anything on ED, the better... I have heard this term before, but it always leaves me scratching my head. It makes no sense in the context of this disagreement.
> It makes no sense in the context of this disagreement.
It does (to me at least). teadrinker is obviously claiming that all of the guys defending (or just agreeing with) the blogger (Anne) are 'white knights.' You might not agree with that claim (as I don't), but it does make sense in context.
But how could they be angling for sexual favors when they are essentially anonymous, and she is a married woman with grown children? It seems like it's been taken wildly out of context, and the term is being used to attempt to mock and shame people (many of whom are straight women). I find it to be a silly stretch, at the very least.
> I shouldn't but I can. And that, is what freedom
> of speech is all about.
Maybe I should have qualified that "can't." But you are right. You're welcome to do it, but don't hold your breath waiting for people to view it as a great logical rebuttal.
Yes, I'm serious. Are you? It's hard to tell from your reply.
First of all, all moral codes are artificial.
Second, no one is enforcing anything. There's no force involved here, at all.
Third, "Don't like it, leave" is precisely what happened.
Noah was a dick. The OP called him on it. What's your problem with that?
I'd argue the main reason it failed was it was a bad idea. Their was no market for your product no matter how well you made it.
Try not to take away execution lessons when the idea was poor. The execution was fine and if you'd have used a good idea you'd be doing reasonably well now.
As an aside, does anyone have links to other startup postmortems?
