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By Justin Lee, theWHIR.comJune 6, 2005 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- A mysterious, curvaceous woman appears in the doorway of a dark and abandoned warehouse. Dressed in stilettos, she struts seductively toward us, her face concealed by the shadows.
Suddenly, the camera zooms in for a close-up. It's Paris Hilton - the hotel heiress-turned reality-TV star, sometimes actor, sometimes sex-tape co-star. She drops her ivory fur shawl, revealing a sexy black swimsuit underneath.
The camera cuts to Paris, who bends over to retrieve a drenched, soapy sponge. She draws the sponge up to her exposed cleavage and ... SERVERERROR.
Thousands of surfers seeking a glimpse of Paris were presumably disappointed last week when SpicyParis.com (spicyparis.com) - a site created by hamburger chain Carls Jr. to distribute Hilton's television spot promoting the restaurant's new burger - crashed and had to shut down for four hours. The high traffic was more than the site was equipped to handle, exhausting its servers and leading to the downtime.
"We just weren't prepared for the influx of traffic, and disappointed a number of visitors," Brad Haley, executive vice president ofmarketing for Carl's Jr., said in a statement. "It turned out that Paris was too hot for our servers."
The company spun the crash as a compliment. And truthfully, online distribution was not a key consideration in the campaign - the ad can frequently be seen on television. But the server-crashing flood of attention is an indication that online delivery should be a consideration.
Hot or not, the outcome of Carl's Jr.'s crash was that users hoping to see the company's ad went away disappointed. And these days, there's no reason that a company putting content online should have to leave itself that unprepared, says Bob Hammond, CTO of content deliverynetwork operator Mirror Image Internet (www.mirror-image.com). Not when companies like Mirror image offer products that can leave a company prepared for just such a traffic spike.
Content delivery networks mirror content at various locations around the globe, delivering those copies to nearby users and offloading the work from the origin server. Enabling Web site operators to serve files from a network outside their own sites, content delivery solutions provide a scalable and cost-effective solution that eliminates some of the need for extra equipment and IT staffing.
While it can be difficult to predict how much traffic a site like SpicyParis.com, says Hammond, content providers should account for all variables before deciding on the best solution.
"There's no magic bullet as to how to figure out how much capacity you need," he says, "but you can get a feel for it just by the size of your target, the heaviness of the content that you're pushing, and the current size of the form you have in place."
One sure-fire way for content providers to be prepared for any potential traffic bursts without blowing their budgets, says Hammond, is to deploy content delivery solutions. The flexible service enables site operators to customize their capacity size, allowing for a steady and consistent flow of traffic.
And if that flood of traffic never materializes, site operators aren't left having paid for a complex infrastructure that went unused.
"You pay for what you deliver," he says. "If you deliver a small amount of content then your bill is not that large. As you increase the amount of content that you push across our network, we'll bill you accordingly."
"It's good for a site like this which is somewhat unsure how much content they're going to push."
Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
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May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
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