Need bandwidth in a hurry?

Fans of the Beckhams the Americans are not it seems - they prefer something a little more relaxing - cheddarvision.tv!

Well that's great. The publicity that Victoria Beckham generated by allowing herself to be likened to our block of cheese has pushed cheddarvision.tv right up to 1.5 million visitors but for a few days earlier this month it looked like that figure could double.

In the week following Posh's move State-side cheddarvision.tv was contacted by one of the worlds top-10 websites.  They wanted to warn us that a link was about to appear on the front page of their site and we should expect a little traffic.

Their estimate of peak traffic was ~100 people... per second!  That's around 360'000 people an hour - or 8.5million people a day!? 

Ok - so cheddarvision.tv has been pretty streamlined, load-balanced, and because it's hosted by us lot we're pretty happy that it can take a hit without breaking a sweat... but now suddenly we're talking about terabytes of data.

So what's the solution?  More servers, definately but where can you find a lot of cpu and bandwidth at short notice?  Amazon's S3 is great but it's complex to set up for something so simple, Akamai were just not quick enough to get hold of...

Then, after a plea to a newsgroup we found XCalibre and their great new service: FlexiScale

FlexiScale is a fast, affordable and scalabale solution for people who need a lot of grunt in a hurry. 

Within just a few hours of first contact ( out of office hours I should add ) we had our hands on 5 clean install linux boxes.  A little bit of yum, compile up Apache ( we tweek our Apaches a little so we go for source installs ) and we were ready to deal with over 10'000 concurrent requests... with plenty of headroom on each machine and plenty of bandwidth available.

Now, anyone who's dealt with anything as volatile as the press will be completely unsurprised to hear that, at the 11th hour, it was all called off!!  The number of columns about Victoria had waned during the week and I think they'd missed the boat.

But the great thing is - next time this happens we know we can deal with it.  Isotope don't, and would never really, have cause to keep this amount of hardware lying about in a datacentre for on-off occasions.  I doubt than any of our colleagues would be any different...

... so if you need to get your hands on some bandwidth and/or some cpu in a hurry - XCalibre are there to help and I for one am very glad to know they are.