I'm afraid of sites like tech crunch destroying me. I had some trouble with a read-only site when it started getting hundreds of digg users a minute, and it was a simple application. God help you if you have a dynamic front page and a web app that does lots of reads and writes.
Scaling for mass media traffic seems like such a waste -- the big-news-site traffic comes right when you launch, and then that's just the time you want lots of capacity and don't have it yet. After the traffic leaves, you don't want it anymore.
Has anyone tried something like media temple for temporary scaling? I'd be tempted to throw a site on there to see if they can handle a tech crunching.
There's a good talk by doug kaye of itconversation with Jeff Bar on using (Amazon) S3 storage with Gigvox media. They have essentially outsourced their hardware & servers (distribution) instead concentrating their efforts on podcasts. ~ http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail1728.html
worth the listen to see how one company has tackled the 'temporary' scaling problem.
Scaling for mass media traffic seems like such a waste -- the big-news-site traffic comes right when you launch, and then that's just the time you want lots of capacity and don't have it yet. After the traffic leaves, you don't want it anymore.
Has anyone tried something like media temple for temporary scaling? I'd be tempted to throw a site on there to see if they can handle a tech crunching.