Interesting email from my web host.

B

bunnykins

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50 Million page hits in 9 hours? 6000% increase in traffic? No problem. Boston Magazine relies on Bird Hosting's Public Cloud during a widespread, multinational news release

http://birdhosting.com/hosting-news...g-handles-the-traffic-spike-without-a-problem

“Can your hosting provider sustain traffic of over 50 million page views in 9 hours with a sustained peak traffic of over 600Mbps? We can.” said Kris Wandall, Bird Hosting’s Account Manager for Boston Magazine.

On Thursday, Boston Magazine published an exclusive article containing never before seen photos of the capture of Boston bombing suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The photos were leaked by Massachusetts State Police Sgt. Sean Murphy in response to the recent Rolling Stones cover featuring the alleged bomber. The release of the exclusive photos caused the article to become instantly viral with multinational news covering the story and creating an unprecedented amount of website traffic.

With little to no notice, bostonmagazine.com peaked to over 60 times its normal peak traffic. Through advanced Cloud hosting technologies with custom CDN integration, and near limitless vertically scalable public cloud technology, Bird Hosting was easily able to handle the huge increase in traffic and keep bostonmagazine.com online.

Lewis George, Bird Hosting's Director of Technology stated, “Within minutes of seeing huge reports of increased traffic in bostonmagazine.com we were able to respond and optimize our public cloud to accommodate the additional visitors. Bird Hosting was not privy to the exclusivity of the story that Boston Magazine was releasing and how much traffic it would actually generate until about 5 minutes after it went live.”

Lewis and his dedicated support staff worked throughout the night to ensure Boston Magazine’s website was optimized and could handle the unexpected amount of site hits. It is still generating upwards of 50 thousand page requests per second as the story spreads and the system is performing flawlessly thanks to Bird Hosting's advanced technology and the high level expertise of the support staff.

You can view the article and exclusive photos here:
http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/blog/2013/07/18/tsarnaev/

About Bird Hosting
Bird Hosting provides top Tier IV Data Center level hosting services for its clients ranging from start-ups, to international enterprises. We are a family of Cloud Hosting companies that have been in business since 1999 with the lowest turnover rate of clients in the industry. We specialize in Public Cloud, Private Cloud, Custom Solutions, and White Label Reselling.
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I should ask but I bet that bostonmagazine has dedicated or vps and not shared.
 
This was actually not a Dedicated Server (we don't sell dedicated servers, any), or a single VM.

This was an AppLogic Public Cloud with an SSD Storage pool. In this particular customer's "application" there is a single IN-gateway (which is why you ping a single address), that passes traffic to a load balancer, which then distributes the traffic across multiple web servers. Each web-server has been heavily optimized to be able to process tens of thousands of requests per second.


No one in their right mind would put a news corporation like Boston Magazine on a single dedicated server. It's not flexible enough to accommodate traffic surges. This was running on our PUBLIC Cloud, and the traffic surge had zero impact on other customers running on that cloud (i.e. no noisy neighbor effect).


It was an interesting day, to say the least.
 
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bunnykins said:
I should ask but I bet that bostonmagazine has dedicated or vps and not shared.
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The email you quoted looks like a sales (perhaps even spam) email. Were you alluding to the fact that it may not have been sent with permission or the nature of the email? If the latter, it appears that Brent did a nice job clarifying that. I'd personally still be curious about the former though...
 
I just figured it was part of their news letter. Although it did seem like they were boasting a bit. I actually had a small conversation with Brent about it, mainly because my site gets too many connection errors from time to time.
 
RH-Jordie said:
The email you quoted looks like a sales (perhaps even spam) email. Were you alluding to the fact that it may not have been sent with permission or the nature of the email? If the latter, it appears that Brent did a nice job clarifying that. I'd personally still be curious about the former though...
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Boston Magazine is fully aware of the email and blog posts and they were made with their explicit permission.
 
They probably liked the fee advertisement any way. I checked out the site after I got the email. I had honestly not been to that site before so it was neat checking out the other news articles as well.
 
bunnykins said:
They probably liked the fee advertisement any way. I checked out the site after I got the email. I had honestly not been to that site before so it was neat checking out the other news articles as well.
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I am sure they did too. Companies like them get paid for both page views and clicks from their advertisers, so the more traffic the merrier.
 
I would love it if my site had as much traffic as this one. Now that would be neat. Although I would not be able to have shared any more.
 
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