What this article doesn't tell you is that the human who wrote it works for Narrative Science.

For those who don't know, if you see a story in your local paper, and it doesn't involve a car crash, crime, weather, or sports, it was probably placed there by a PR representative. Most of the things you read are not the result of random reporters deciding to cover X or Y, but a paid, concerted effort to place story X or Y in the paper by providing the paper with a fully pre-digested story to perhaps rewrite, or perhaps not.

The words "narrative science" appear 14 times in that story, including such clunkers as "To generate story “angles,” explains Mr. Hammond of Narrative Science...." when Mr. Hammond has already been introduced earlier in the story. It even includes pricing: hey readers, this is not only cool and will win the Pulitzer Prize, but it's cheap too! No mention of competitors... It reads like an ad because it is an ad.

This story was provided, probably almost word for word, by a PR person to the NYT reporter.

I'm not sure if computer-generated text will be better or worse than the media system we have now.

This seems too expensive and I'd like to try and help, so I'm going to give you an idea of my hosting bill and why it's low and then suggest something for you:

I pay around $3k per month. I own my own servers and lease a full rack and I serve roughly 1 billion page impressions per month. My bandwidth consumption is measured in Mbps rather than amount of data transferred because I get billed using 95th percentile billing. I average around 130 megabits per second of transfer - constantly, peaking at 150mbps I'm transferring roughly 40 terabytes of data per month. 95th percentile billing and owning your own servers is they key here.

To give you an idea, for one month of your hosting bill you can buy 1, possibly 2 servers from Dell and put them in a half rack that will cost you around $800/month including power, secure access, bandwidth, etc. Those servers will last around 5 years with a possible drive replacement or two during that time for a few bucks.

But I think you have another problem that's making things worse. With 15,000 active users you should be able to support them on one or two small Linode servers using round robin DNS. That's a relatively small user base and the number of requests per second can't be anything more than 10 per second? So I'm guessing something about your basic app architecture is off. It could be that you're not using Nginx to reverse proxy to Apache and you think you need more apache children/processes, and therefore more memory, than you actually do. You could have a DB that doesn't have indexes in the right places and so you're IO bound.

I would suggest first looking at your app and seeing where the bottlenecks are in performance. Fix that first, then look at hosting.

Questions:

-How many servers do you currently have and give us a rough idea of config.

-How many app requests per second do you get at peak?

-What's your peak bandwidth throughput in Mbps?

-On your servers, is lack of CPU or lack of disk throughput the bottleneck?

-Have you had problems running out of memory that caused you to buy more servers? Which app ran out of memory?

-Give us an idea of your server config. e.g. nginx -> Apache -> MySQL & Redis. Do the servers talk to each other and if so what do they do?

Okay, so this is gonna be a bit longer, but bear with me, because I think reading this might help you.

I've been exactly where you've been. AND I did almost all the things that people here suggest. Thought I had ADHD and took Ritalin. Thought I had a depression and took Prozac (both of which I definitely cannot recommend, as they screwed badly with my short term memory).

I've tried gazillions of plugins, "hacks", to-do lists and the like, only to see that if you're smart (I assume you are because you're posting here), your subconcious is only smarter. If there's one universal truth I got out of these, it's: You can't shit yourself.

I've personally read Getting Things Done, The Now Habit, Eat That Frog and consumed lots more of self-help from some of the distinguished authors there are, including Tony Robbins, David Allen, Steven Covey, Brian Tracy, Keith Ferrazzi, Leo Babauta etc. (just to name a few).

I can honestly say that all of those books gave me something, some pushed me over the edge for a week, but then I slipped back into procrastination and self-pity. So here's the deal: For some of us, it's just much harder to stay focused on our goals and dreams. All that can and will change, but only with the right leverage, and your missing piece of the puzzle might be a different one that someone else needs. Anyway, I'll be listing the things from all those excellent books above that helped me most (repeating some of the excellent suggestions here), and finishing with my personal missing piece, that I only received a few weeks ago.

So what helps?

- Get rid of your TV if you have it. Completely. That's really just a senseless time-sucker and you won't miss it within a week.

- Babysteps, babysteps, babysteps. Taken from today's Hacker News: "I can not emphasize how important baby steps are. They are the key to avoiding fatal frustration. I have a law that helps define the size of subtasks: DO NOT EVER LEAVE THE COMPUTER IF YOUR PROGRAM DOES NOT RUN." http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/09/11/video-game-progr...

- Fighting your urge to "procrastinate" all day long leads to lots of decision fatigue that will make everything just worse: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/do-you-suffer-fro... . The best way around this is to create habits, as they will get you on autopilot through difficult procrastination situations within a month. Some great thoughts on this from Leo Babauta: http://zenhabits.net/will/ My personal take on this: The key is starting out VERY slow (one habit a month at the most) and keeping your expectations really low. The habit itself needs to survive through all times and is more important than the actual outcome. Example from me: I do exercises right before showering, but the least I do is 5 pushups. That sounds like nothing, and actually it isn't but I do them no matter what - drunk, late, sad, happy. Habits will eventually carry you through everything, but you just stick to them. Suggestions for you: Not reading e-mail after or before a certain time, turning of the computer completely at a certain time. Stuff like that.

- Building on that, affirmations and meditation are extremely powerful as a habit too. I've written an article on this if you're interested: http://www.growinup.org/?p=5

- Gym and sports definitely helps your willpower, as long as you don't discover another way of procrastination in there. It can happen ;-)

- Knowing what you really want. Maybe you know already (I certainly did), but you're too scared and unfocused to really take action. If you're too scared, watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lk0hSeQ5s_k If you're too unfocused, read this: http://focusmanifesto.com/ Anyway, know what you wanna do and where you're going.

- All these things helped me in a way, but the final piece for me comes here as promised. I've had a huge fight with my wife for all kinds of reasons related to my procrastination, and she told me something I've never forgot. I've distilled the essence of what she told me on a paper and I read it every night. Here it is, for you all to read:

"Every time I pray, I feel you falling down this black hole, but I cannot help you. Only YOU can do it. No amount of reading or games or [insert your timesucker here] can fill that emptiness inside of you. So don't do stuff out of an impulse. Do it conciously. Whatever you do, choose to do it and accept the consequences. Don't be guilty about anything anymore - just accept that you made your choice and be responsible. There's no need to lie to yourself. It's just ok. Live, breathe, be gentle. There is one and one way only out of the frustration, anger and depression: Accept your choices. Love yourself. Leave the guild behind and FOLLOW YOUR HEART".

Since then I've been living by it and haven't gone back to bad. Truth is, I HAVE been reading Hacker News and playing a round since then. But I chose to do it because I felt like it. I didn't hide it, I didn't feel guilty about it. Taking responsibility for every single thing that you do sounds harsh, but it helps you grow enormously. Think of it: That way you also reap full honor and appreciation for everything you do. So next time you feel that urge, just do the following: Think about what you're about to do. What will it lead to? Will you accept that outcome and take full responsibility? And then just do it - or not. It works the same way if you're already in the middle of that procrastination mess. The second you see you made an unconcious choice, make a concious one instead. Will you continue - or stop and do something worth it?

I told you it's gonna be a pretty long post. So you finally arrived here, congratulations. You already took the time to read it - now take the time to do it, and you won't fail anymore. Promise.

Best,

Dominik