Are the websites behind Show HN posts still up? We checked 2,178
We collected every Show HN post with at least 15 points from January 2025 through September 2026 and requested the homepage of each one that linked to its own website. The check ran on October 14, 2026.
What we counted
Show HN is the part of Hacker News where people post things they made. From the public HN Algolia API we pulled every Show HN post created between January 1, 2025 and September 30, 2026 with at least 15 points. That came to 4,628 posts.
2,014 of them (43.5%) link to GitHub or another code host, 172 (3.7%) to an app store or a shared hosting domain like vercel.app, and 183 (4%) have no link. The other 2,259 link to a website of the project's own. Some projects were posted more than once, so those posts cover 2,178 sites.
On October 14, 2026 we requested each site’s homepage. Sites that were not up on the first request were tried again later in the same run, at every address they had been posted under.
Most were still up
1,843 sites (84.6%) were up. We counted both normal pages and 401, 403 or 429 responses as up: a server answered, though that does not tell us whether visitors could use the site. 91 more (4.2%) redirected to a page on a different domain. We didn’t look into why each of those moved.
115 sites (5.3%) were gone by the rules in the method section. Another 102 (4.7%) failed on the day with a timeout, a certificate error or a server error. A failure like that can be temporary, so we did not count those as gone. We could not classify 27 (1.2%).
The older the post, the fewer sites still up
We grouped sites by the quarter of their first post in our data. For Jan–Mar 2025, 69.9% were up and 13.6% were gone, roughly one site in 7. For Jul–Sep 2026, it was 97% up and 0.3% gone.
Most gone sites no longer resolve
Of the 115 gone sites, 99 have a host name that no longer resolves. The few we looked up by hand had no NS records. We did not check registration records, so we can’t say whether those domains expired or were deleted. Only 16 still had a server that returned 404 or 410 for the homepage.
None of this tells us why a site went away, or whether the project carried on somewhere else.
No page matched our rule for parked “domain for sale” pages, which needs a small page with a matching title. Parked pages that miss either condition would end up in another group.
Sites from higher-scoring posts were more often up
Among sites whose best post scored 300 or more, 91.6% were up, against 82.3% for sites whose best post scored 15 to 29. We did not adjust for when the sites were posted, so this does not show that a higher score keeps a site up.
| Best post | Sites | Up | Gone | Failed that day |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 15-29 | 744 | 82.3% | 7.4% | 5.4% |
| 30-99 | 793 | 83.6% | 4.8% | 5.4% |
| 100-299 | 463 | 87.5% | 4.1% | 3.2% |
| 300+ | 178 | 91.6% | 1.7% | 2.2% |
43.5% of the posts link to code
Posts linking to code-hosting domains are counted above by link type but left out of the website-status numbers. A repository usually stays reachable after work on it stops, and we did not check repository activity.
Domain endings
.com was the most common ending, on 40.2% of sites, followed by .ai (7.2%), .dev (7.1%), .io and .app. Across quarters the .ai share went up and down between 4.7% and 9.8%.
How often post titles mention AI
We flagged a title if it contains AI, LLM, GPT, MCP or RAG, or a model or company name such as ChatGPT, Claude, Llama, Mistral, DeepSeek or OpenAI. The rule can miss AI posts and can flag unrelated posts that use the same words. We did not measure either error rate.
Each month, 14.6% to 25.4% of titles matched. The peak was April 2026. Over the last three months the average was 17.9%.
If you have posted something to Show HN
- Check that your domain is set to auto-renew and that the payment method on the registrar account is current. If the domain stops resolving, every link that goes through it stops working.
- If you stop working on a project but keep the domain, a single page saying so, or a redirect, keeps those links useful.
Method and limits
- Unit: one site per host name, with and without “www.” counted as the same site. A site is dated by its first post in the window that reached 15 points. That is not necessarily when the project launched; earlier posts and posts under 15 points are not in the data.
- Up: a 2xx page on the same site, or a 401, 403 or 429 response or bot challenge from it. Redirects to another domain: the request ended at a 2xx page on a different domain. Gone: the posted host name does not resolve, the homepage of the registered domain returns 404 or 410, or a small page whose title says the domain is for sale. Timeouts, certificate errors and server errors count as failed that day, not gone.
- When a site was requested more than once, it gets the best result, in the order up, redirects, failed that day, unclear, gone.
- A site being up does not mean anyone still works on the project. We did not look at whether companies or code continued elsewhere.
- All requests were made from one server on October 14, 2026. Another day or another location could give different results, especially for the failed-that-day group.
- Posts under 15 points were left out entirely. Posts linking to code hosts, app stores or shared hosting domains were counted by link type, but those sites were not checked.
- The collection and classification script was reviewed before it ran. We publish the totals and keep the list of sites private.
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