It’s always nice to be able to give a good reason why a move to the cloud, with it’s elastically scalable attributes, makes sense for sites with lumpy traffic patterns. A perfect (marginally NSFW) example of this came across my browser yesterday. The nzgirl website launched a campaign to “raise money and awareness for breast cancer”. In a none-too-subtle approach, the campaign asked Kiwi women to “get their tits out for the girls” (we’re all class down here in New Zealand). The site asked women to post photographs to their breasts and apparently for every 50 photos uploaded, nzgirl promised to donate $1000 to breast cancer research.

Not surprisingly, the resultant traffic surge (one assumes originating from an atypical demographic than normally peruses the site) crashed the website. Apparently 25000 people tried to look at the website simultaneously, many orders of magnitude greater than the average load and this extra demand crashed the site entirely. 12 hours later, and purely in the interests of research for this post, I attempted to load the site and it was still marginally operative.

Of course, if they’d only gone with  scalable cloud provider they’d have had the opportunity to give every red-blooded Kiwi male (and one assumes every open-minded Kiwi girl wanting to post pictures of her “assets”) access to the site. Alas however, heir infrastructure didn’t take advantage of the power of the cloud, and several half a country missed some quality content.

So chose the cloud, and you too can utilize soft porn to gain site traffic, without the concern of sex-crazed hordes brining your little part of the web down.

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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