Interest in Mastershot exploded overnight

Hey IH,

I thought I'd share the story of what happened with Mastershot this week. It was insane.

Last Saturday night I made a small post to Reddit r/webdev announcing the launch of Mastershot and then went to sleep. The next morning I took a look at how the post was doing not expecting much, but to my surprise it already had over 1000 likes and over 100 comments! Very soon after that, it had reached the top of the subreddit's daily view[1]. It's currently standing at #3 in the weekly view.

Over the course of 2 days I had already gained 1000+ new sign ups, thousands of uses of my login-free tools, and tens of thousands of page views! At some point, someone posted about it to Hackernews where it reached the front page which drove an additional tens of thousands of people to Mastershot.

Concerned about my server crashing with all this traffic, I took a look at the stats and realized that even at peak traffic (over 700 concurrent users) it had barely hit 4% CPU usage. Now you may be thinking, what sort of crazy server did I buy? It was a $10 DigitalOcean droplet. This leads me to the first lesson I learned from this.

CLOUDFLARE IS AWESOME!

Over the past week they have:

Served 500,000+ requests
Cached 35GB out of 39GB of data

All for free!

Another thing that I realized before I decided to officially launch it to the world, was that I kept on adding "1 more feature" and was slowly losing motivation to work on the project. So I decided that if the decision was between launching or shelving, I chose launching.

Thank you for reading!

If you enjoyed reading this, you can follow my journey on twitter at https://twitter.com/JacobBeckerman

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/nt6gus/i_created_a_browserbased_video_editor_100_free/