I want to use Hacker News’ open source software to build a link sharing community for another industry. I followed the instructions on the arc github page and was able to get a clone up and running on my local environment. I was wondering what the next steps were.
What kind of hosting is required for this kind of a site (since arc is a bit esoteric)? If we assume that I have substantial traffic, is it best to go the cloud hosting route? I noticed Hacker News itself is hosted with ThePlanet, should I do the same?
For any kind of lisp hosting, you’re pretty much on your own. It depends on how serious you are about doing this, and how big the starting community will be. If it’s a work thing, talk to your network guy about getting a server provisioned. If it’s a personal project, you should really consider a VPS server; something like Linode or Slicehost. Note that these aren’t specifically Lisp hosts; they give you a bare metal Linux server and let you do what you want with it (including hosting Lisp apps).