

Tools for spike traffic: what's out there? - Hexayurt

Here's what I'm looking for. It should be a trivial service - something like a .JS or .GIF I can drop on to the pages of my site. When I start getting DIGG or REDDIT traffic, it should send a message to my email/phone/pager within 15 or 20 minutes, telling me that I'm getting nailed, and I should keep an eye on things. It should also tell me the URL I've got incoming from.<p>It'd be nice if it, or a second service, would cache the pages which are being nailed, and show me how to do a redirect to the cached pages for whatever software environment I'm on (i.e. auto-generate a .htaccess line for mod-rewrite, or the appropriate incantations for other configurations.)<p>And, just out of curiosity, why don't things like WordPress have an option to automatically generate a redirect to the Coral Cache version of pages when they get nailed?<p>Spike traffic is a really here-to-stay phenomena, and I don't understand why the only effective tool commonly recommended is "build a ton of overcapacity and let it sit idle the rest of the time."<p>There's got to be room for new approaches here.
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marcus
Notification is not very interesting, as it doesn't help you withstand the
spike, there is little you can do once the spike started to help. But
something that will help you withstand the spike now thats an interesting
question, there are tons of tool to help you withstand the traffic better but
none that I know of are plug & play or leverage your capacity beyond what can
be provided by your existing hardware. Maybe a distributed offsite cache
application, maybe even a p2p approach i.e. a 1000 blogs subscribe to the
service and the load of spikes is distributed among them. Both of these could
be the basis of a good business model actually... Too bad the Winter 2008
deadline for YC applications passed.

But a well crafted website should be able to withstand a ton of traffic
without any outside help, check out plentyoffish.

