Ask HN: Bracing for Traffic

by mrtomservo on 8/14/2023, 2:43:23 PM with 3 comments
With a bit of luck and the arrival of some stickers, I’ll be launching a website for my wife this week, who has Polycystic Kidney Disease. We’re looking for a living donor, and I’ve put a website together to funnel people into our hospital’s donor intake system. This is about as much as I personally can do besides raise awareness: I tried to donate my own kidney but found out I have a disqualifying structural abnormality with my own kidneys. I’ll be fine.

In addition to my own (middling, 110-follower) social media, lI’m budgeting for getting Cameos from one or two of her favorite actors mentioning the site and using those for sponsored Instagram posts focusing on our local area, along with free stickers and yard signs. I’m hoping we get enough traction that maybe maybe maybe we get a local news segment. What I’m worried about, ironically, is if that segment gets picked up nationally, or goes viral or whatever, and the website gets hugged to death. Our donor can actually be anywhere in North America.

So, I wanted this website to be high-performing and fast with near-zero infrastructure to worry about. The single-page site is vanilla HTML, CSS, and a tiny bit of JavaScript served from an AWS CloudFront distribution with an S3 bucket as its origin. The whole payload is 435K, and most of that is images and a font from Typekit (or Adobe Fonts or whatever it is now). Security certificates are all from AWS. Mail for the domain is being handled by a paid ImprovMX account routing to my Gmail (where I’ve got rules and things set up). The image of my wife is print-resolution for a single newspaper column, more or less. The mailing address is a UPS Store mailbox. Responsive design for mobile. High-contrast colors for accessibility. Perhaps it goes without saying, but my wife and I don’t have an expectation of total privacy during this period of our lives, but we would like to maintain our physical safety.

These are all the things I could think of, but my question is: What am I forgetting? If this website gets picked up by the New York Times, what technical fires am I going to be putting out? There is a near-zero chance this will happen, but near zero is nonzero, and every pair of eyeballs we get is connected to a pair of kidneys that might be a match.

Thanks in advance for your help! And you if you feel called to, please share: https://www.michelleneedsakidney.org/

  • by frfl on 8/14/2023, 3:20:47 PM

    One small optimization that could help at scale is serving smaller images, with links to full sized images. Perhaps a separate "Press" page or a "Press" section with links to full sized images.

    Mainly sticker.jpg and michelle.jpg, which account for over 180kb almost 1/3 of your total bytes on your webpage

    Besides that you could look to use system fonts instead of custom ones, https://systemfontstack.com/ to eliminate 3 fonts from your loading

    Finally, you could probably remove the apple-touch-icon.png and associated HTML, unless you really expect people to pin the website to their home pages (I think that's what apple-touch-icon.png is used for, like a PWA?)

    Good luck OP, I hope it goes well for you and your wife

  • by ac2u on 8/14/2023, 5:07:20 PM

    Sometimes folks have too long a TTL on their DNS records, but yours seem fine.

    Helps to be able to get traffic directed elsewhere faster should you need it (given your setup I doubt you'll do much better for scalability than edge-cached static CDN content).

    Short TTLs aren't a sure thing, but can help. Recommend they be lengthened again once things are stable to be a better internet citizen.

  • by lusus_naturae on 8/14/2023, 3:13:11 PM

    Maybe also link to resources for the potential donor? https://livingdonorsonline.org/ldosmf/index.php?board=3.0

    Other than that, I am sure you're already aware of load and stress testing frameworks and tools.

    Good luck to you both.