Just wanted to give everyone an update on the mess over the weekend and even into today… As I post this our Rackspace servers will probably crash and burn, but oh well. Here are some of the events that played out over the past couple days and why your favorite blogger’s favorite blog site was pretty much non-existent. We were hit hard from a stunning amount of traffic with the Amazon Kindle 2 post. That was completely expected, and ever since our last server issues, we’ve added another server and currently use Akamai as a CDN to help spread out the server load. That helped for a bit, but as soon as we published information on the Storm, all hell broke loose. We’ve been doing around 95Mbps at the switch in traffic on and off since Friday night, and apparently as good as a setup as we have wasn’t enough.
We’re in the process of adding an additional server and load balancer, so if you see us go down for a little bit in the early AM (ET), you’ll know why. We’ve been growing every month and the combination of regular readers coupled with the Slashdots, Engadgets, Gizmodos, and other sites certainly brought in more visitors than we could handle. We’ve hit over 7,000,000 page views in the last month, our highest ever, and what better time to upgrade our hardware? We’re upgrading everything (and believe me, we’re paying out the ass for it) and all should be well in short time. Thanks for sticking with us, guys, and thanks for the support. We’ll be working overtime to make sure we come through with more hotness. Except hopefully next time, we don’t blow Rackspace’s data center out…
