The First Publicity Spike: “I Love Lucy”
In 1954, municipal engineers noticed a disturbing pattern. Water pressure would drop dramatically every Monday night at 9:30pm. The cause: “I Love Lucy” was the most popular show in America, and viewers would wait until the end of the show to visit the restroom.
Publicity Spike Defined
A publicity spike is a sudden increase in traffic due to a public event. For example, when the Chicago Bulls win a game, fans visit ChicagoBulls.com en masse to learn more about the team. WisdomGroup experienced a similar publicity spike this week with one of our sites, ChrisGardnerMedia.com.
German Television Viewers
On Sunday, May 10, 2009, The Pursuit of Happyness was shown on ProSieben, a German television station that is also distributed in Austria. The movie concluded at approximately 3:30pm Chicago time. Immediately the German and Austrian viewers went to their computers to learn more about Chris Gardner. Google led them to ChrisGardnerMedia.com. It felt like the entire German & Austrian populations were hitting the site simultaneously. Roughly 45% were from Germany, and 15% from Austria.
This level of visitors is never a problem for our network. The challenge: Simultaneous visitors, all downloading large image files and flash animations at once. Imagine a thousand people running for a single door at the same time.
Our Solution: Amazon Web Services
Amazon.com began selling excess data center capacity about three years ago. The company had built multiple data centers to handle the Christmas rush, and the equipment was mostly dormant the rest of the year. AWS was originally created to sell this spare capacity. The AWS business quickly developed life of its own. Amazon is a cloud computing pioneer.
Moving Large Files Into the Cloud
WisdomGroup’s analysis of web traffic led us to move certain files related to ChrisGardnerMedia.com into the Amazon cloud. Image files, especially flash animations, are much larger than other files. The flash and images are now being served by thousands of servers in the Amazon cloud. High-traffic web sites are better served by thousands of cloud servers than one big server. When one cloud server gets overloaded, the others take up the slack. Bring on the spikes!
Continued Monitoring
WisdomGroup monitors network activity 24 × 7 with automated tools. We congratulate Mr. Gardner on his popularity and we will proactively deal with any spikes that occur.
Chris Gardner is more popular than “I Love Lucy”!