Fast or Slow
Hi all. We&#x27;re really flattered to be on the home page of hacker news. Thanks!!<p>You caught us by surprise. As you can see we&#x27;ve built in the ability to gracefully handle a lot of traffic but it&#x27;s not ideal because you need to wait in a queue until we have enough capacity. So I wanted to jump on here and give you an update of a release we&#x27;re putting out next week.<p>FastOrSlow does actual browser simulations from around 12 locations around the world. When we first architected it, we wanted to provide as many locations as possible including places like South Africa. That meant in some cases we needed actual bare-metal servers. So we built it on bare metal in data centers around the world.<p>We experienced some moderate popularity about a month ago and realized we needed to do a better job of scaling on demand. So we re-evaluated moving on to AWS. Around the same time AWS launched in Cape Town and a few other locations, and so we were able to get the kind of coverage we wanted globally.<p>So we kicked off an AWS migration. We&#x27;re days away from moving into AWS and using spot instances to ramp up and down fast based on demand. But as I said, you caught us by surprise.<p>So please give FastOrSlow a try today, but know that by around late next week we&#x27;ll be doing a much better job of handling your requests FAST without having to wait in line.<p>Thanks for your interest and patience. Myself and the lead architect, Ryan, will be here to answer any questions and of course listen to your suggestions.<p>Regards,<p>Mark.