Traffic was unexpected, I was expecting the site to travel within a small group of friends and colleagues who were in on the joke. I uploaded the site to a mediatemple (dv) server, on which Apache's MaxClients is set to a paltry 20. Whilst the server appears to be fine, Apache is unable to satisfy the requests, and I am unwilling to up the MaxClients because normally (mt) automatically disable the server.

It appears that most of the requests were being made to the ~8 images on the homepage, so I've moved these to an S3 bucket and the site is now responsive again. Hardly HIGH TECHNOLOGY, but any port works in a storm (and AWS is typically my 'any port').

I've also repointed nameservers to run via a https://www.cloudflare.com/ free account which should provide a reverse caching proxy for the homepage at the least, but will take some time to kick in.

The lesson to learn — one that I would expect most would not need to learn — is that launching a website (even in jest) in a 5 minute break in-between real work with real deadlines is not advisable.

And to second the parent post, I don't feel comfortable with this being posted to HN at all, and certainly not with it ranking #1/#2. I fear someone may have timed it perfectly to start Eternal February.

There is nothing wrong with your HIGH TECHNOLOGY. Yes, it is S3, and it is kind of boring because from the customer's perspective it just magically works, but you know what they say about things that are indistinguishable from magic... ;)

There is also nothing wrong with your flock of kittens on HN. Into each life there must inevitably come some kittens. We all know the first rule of HN: When kittens appear on the top ten, the Apocolypse is nigh. Unfortunately, the second rule of HN is that too many of us, when presented with a button clearly marked APOCALYPSE, cannot always resist the urge to press it just once just to see what happens next:

http://xkcd.com/242/

And besides, at least the kittens aren't discussing politics.

Are you the famfamfam guy from the Silk icon set? If so, let me say thank you, you did a huge service to the community by releasing those high-quality icons at a time where there were no decent free icon set available for web apps.

Keep up the good work. I love kittens, too :)

They've also essentially became the official icons of web 2.0 so many sites used them, there should be some sort of lifetime achievement award.

Some of the cropping is surprisingly excellent.

For instance:

http://placekitten.com/g/128/1024

worked so much better than I hoped.

http://placekitten.com/g/1024/128

Isn't half bad either.

Did you deliberately crop like this?

I just wanted to clear something up. A lot of our customers increase MaxClients settings, and we don't usually disable their servers for doing so. You can actually go into our community wiki to see how to do it. Other than that, good luck with S3!

I dunno man. I need placeholders, but there was something missing... But I love kittens even more, so the choice was obvious. This just made my site mid-design look exponentially cuter (meow).