On 17 September 2007 we got a panic call from the owners of Cheddarvision, a favourite on Myspace and YouTube. This web site is normally fairly quiet – after all, watching cheese mature isn’t exactly exciting, as nothing happens for months at a time. But on 19 September they were due to taste test the cheese and the guys were very worried that there would be so much excitement from fans that the site would fall over from the extra traffic, so they wanted an affordable hosting solution that would cope with whatever happened. Time to move them onto FlexiScale.
Can you believe that his site peaked at 80% of our typical total day’s traffic across all customers? Cheddarvision first made the headlines months ago as far afield as the New York Times and became a favourite on Myspace and YouTube, so it had loads of media coverage leading up to the tasting and a massive spike in traffic was expected.
Until the call to us on Monday it had been running on one dedicated server whose provider couldn’t scale up in time or for the cost that we can achieve with FlexiScale. We quickly gave Cheddarvision two extra boxes to see him through the spike and the whole stint will cost him in the region of £35. Compare that to the normal cost of 2 extra servers locked-in for 12 months – he’d be looking at about £5,000. That’s a lot of cheese sales.
FlexiScale is a complete complete no-brainer for anyone like this with fluctuating traffic patterns.
Phil Huber
September 22, 2007 at 10:11 am |
This is a very nice post, and I want to see how others react to this.
September 26, 2007 at 3:16 pm |
I’ve just been told by Phil that in fact the final bill for the Cheddarvision spike will be £98, as the high traffic level went on a bit longer than expected. Still, that works out at less than 2% of what it would have cost with ye olde dedicated server solution and they would never have got fired up in such a short space of time anyway.