How should I host a site that could potentially get a short spike in traffic of 1000%+

Posted by James Simpson on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by James Simpson
Published on 2011-01-29T05:11:39Z Indexed on 2011/01/29 7:27 UTC
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Filed under:

amazon-ec2

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scalability

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cloud-hosting

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mediatemple

This is a purely theoretical question, but what if I had a site that would normally only get a couple thousand hits a day, but for a few days each month that could shoot to several hundred thousand or even several million hits over the period of 1-3 days.

The site would be pretty bare-bones (as in, 2-3 total pages with 1-2 max MySQL queries on each page and some PHP), so bandwidth wouldn't be the issue, but sheer volume taking down the site would be the main concern. Cloud hosting seems like the best way to go, but would something like Amazon EC2, MediaTemple, or something else be the right choice in this case?

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