A recent site I launched received a lot of attention. It may have been the only way to get the momentum going, since Google wouldn’t index a site with no content.

Fortunately, I spent a week before launch optimizing the page loading, serving static files from Amazon, and fixing usability bugs. So the result is a very smooth launch, even when serving many visitors per second. Some users who experienced slow loading issues may have been waiting for the browser to download a 1.3 or 2.0 MB file, which could have caused a traffic jam on a static file server. The technique used here was to serve files that are already compressed with lzma and gzip, respectively. Due to htaccess configuration not being available on Amazon, it was decided to serve these from another server.

The most surprising effect was that Google seemed to have picked up the link as soon as it appeared, along with other sites that mirror content.