mediatemple Stands up to a Digg
Posted by Jon Lee in Site stuff, tags: digg, grid-server, mediatemple
mediatemple’s grid-server hosting claims to be able to scale to intense bursts of traffic (i.e. from a Slashdot or a digg). It accomplishes this by having your account hosted on a “grid”, which allows it to share resources with other servers on the grid. If one server goes down, the other servers simply take over. A wonderful idea at a very very reasonable price ($20/month). I’ve had experiences with previous hosts that could not put up with a high spike in traffic. It would either A) have the server completely go down, or B) noticeably slow down the server, along with any other sites that happened to be hosted with it. But then again, these hosts cost around $5/month (or less) – you get what you pay for I guess!
Media Temple’s Grid-Server is a completely new hosting platform that replaces yesterday’s obsolete shared server technology. We’ve eliminated roadblocks and single points of failure by using hundreds of servers working in tandem for your site, applications, and email. The Grid-Server program’s on-demand scalability means you’ll always be ready for intense bursts of traffic and the growing audience resulting from your online success.
Today I got to put their claims to the test as one of my sites was dugg. It held the top spot in the #1 position of the Top 10 in All News sidebar for 12 hours (seems to be about the maximum amount of time any news story can occupy the sidebar for). As of this post, it has over 4,700 diggs.
This is my Google Analytics graph of Visits and pageviews over the last week. Pageviews went up about 10000%!! And 20000% from the previous day!! The sudden influx of traffic in one day makes it look like I get no hits the other days, but as you can see that is not the case. I should have put in the label for visits (it is 96,109).
Where do the digg users come from? As you can see from the Geo Map Overlay, digg users come from the USA. A handful from Europe and a sprinkle over the rest of the world. It should be noted however, due to the volume of visitors, only places with over ~125 visitors is shown on the map.
Throughout the “ordeal”, the server held up perfectly! mediatemple had absolutely no forewarning of this traffic spike and response time did not seem to slow at all! All other sites hosted on the same account were just as responsive. Overall I’m very impressed with mediatemple, despite minor hiccups earlier in the year.
Digg story link
Update: Story has been off the front page for a while now but is still being dugg, it now has over 5000 diggs!!
Popularity: 2% [?]
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