Hosting that Survives Diggs & Slashdots Guaranteed - Where!?

The question is in the title!

Pete

 

I'm pretty sure my hosting accounts would survive a Digg effect. Not sure about Slashdot though ... The company I use and recommend to anyone is ICDSoft, I'm honestly impressed with them and already using them for over two years. (Check their data center link for information about their servers location)

 

Hmm thanks but it really needs to be able to survive a Slashdot though! (just incase!) or some mechanism that forwards Slashdot traffic to a mirror. I really don't know anything about this. Why is it so hard to find a host that can withstand Slashdot and huge traffic being thrown at it? Jeez.

Pete

 

Let me clear this a bit.. I'm saying my hosting account would probably not survive a Slashdot effect because the network administrators/ the people that mantain the servers would notice the server beeing abused and would probably configure the firewall to reject a part of the incoming connections so that other sites on the servers where my sites are would still be reachable. The tech support and help system is increddible at that company, any help ticket was answered in less than 10 minutes.

If you really want to survive a Slashdot/Digg effect you would rent/buy a dedicated server, use caching mechanisms like memcached or a transparent web proxy to cache pages and mySql requests, maybe even use 2-3 servers and do load balancing on those servers.

I imagine Slashdot effect as about 5-600 connections per minute, if your server is not set properly, it won't be able to keep up with the increasing load. Again, i can only assume as I haven't experienced these "effects".

 

There are a couple of reasons you're having trouble finding hosts able to do this.

Firstly, hosting is extremely competitive, and as a result almost hosts oversell bandwidth, and also memory/CPU/IO (in the case of VPS/shared hosting). Dedicated servers are provided pretty much at stock defaults - there's no tweaking for performance whatsoever.

Secondly, withstanding a Slashdotting/digging is about more than just having enough bandwidth and CPU, it's about having a well designed site. Things like caching squid proxies can help, but if your site is making 50 SQL queries to render a page then your site is still going to have problems.

If you're serious about wanting a site that can withstand that sort of battering, I have plenty of experience in this field, and can provide consultancy to get your codebase up to scratch, as well as hosting. I'd warn you that this doesn't come cheap - the target is very large internet businesses. PM me if you're interested.

If you want to do it on the cheap, the best thing to do is put up a static HTML page. A decent dedicated server should easily be able to process a static page in under 10ms.
Of course, for many scenarios, replacing the dynamic page with a static one isn't an option.

 

What type of site is it, does it have lots of graphics or downloads?

 

The main static html page is 153k in size (..I should probably work on that) and then there is a Wordpress blog attached to the site.

There are downloads but only after someone purchases.

Pete