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I want to use Hacker News' open source software to build a link sharing community for another industry. I followed the instructions on the arc github page and was able to get a clone up and running on my local environment. I was wondering what the next steps were.

What kind of hosting is required for this kind of a site (since arc is a bit esoteric)? If we assume that I have substantial traffic, is it best to go the cloud hosting route? I noticed Hacker News itself is hosted with ThePlanet, should I do the same?

Zoe
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user1059105
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1 Answers1

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For any kind of lisp hosting, you're pretty much on your own. It depends on how serious you are about doing this, and how big the starting community will be. If it's a work thing, talk to your network guy about getting a server provisioned. If it's a personal project, you should really consider a VPS server; something like Linode or Slicehost. Note that these aren't specifically Lisp hosts; they give you a bare metal Linux server and let you do what you want with it (including hosting Lisp apps).

Inaimathi
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  • Thanks for the input! When would cloud hosting become necessary? Would it be necessary if we receive reddit-effect like traffic? Yeah this is a personal project. – user1059105 Feb 02 '12 at 15:37
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    @user1059105 - Pretty much, yeah. You'd need quite a bit of traffic coming in before *having* to go to the cloud (and I'd hope you would do some clever caching of static assets, and maybe get the database onto a separate server before going that route). The hard part of starting something like HN is getting an interested community together, not hosting or writing the software. – Inaimathi Feb 02 '12 at 16:17
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    Thanks, yeah I know having to scale is a good problem to have - but I am just trying to prevent any future consequences of a misinformed choice. Does Amazon EC2 also provide you with a bare bones linux server that I can set lisp up on? – user1059105 Feb 02 '12 at 18:22
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    Well, yeah, but the issue isn't whether they have it. The issue is how much it costs. If you can afford to jump onto the Amazon cloud right away, go for it. Last I checked, it was more expensive to get an EC2 instance than a standard VPS (though they charge at different intervals; Amazon charges you by the hour whereas most VPSes charge you per month plus overages). – Inaimathi Feb 02 '12 at 19:39
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    The EC2 `micro` instances are the least expensive. Fortunately, they tend to be fine for things with modest network I/O, and mild CPU usage that bursts only briefly. That is probably describing your web server in the early days, pre-Reddit. :) So a micro instance may be a good fit for you. Obviously with EC2 there are many options to grow, including larger instances and even load balancing among multiple instances. However the options @Inaimathi mentioned are probably even cheaper. – Greg Hendershott Feb 07 '12 at 20:39