This weekend we experienced huge traffic spikes on the Giant Digital network. We’d been experiencing high levels of traffic for the Rage Against the Machine for Christmas campaign that we’d been covering the last week or two on Gigwise.com and then Brittany Murphy unexpectedly dropped dead causing a huge traffic surge on Entertainmentwise.com.
Fortunately we were ready this time, with load balancing and caching in place on both sites there was an initial slow down as new servers booted up but then we were ready for action. According to Google Analytics (which is way out but gives you some kind of idea) on Gigwise on Saturday we had 24,968 visits, then Sunday while the final build up to the chart count down was happening and we were covering the angles we had a massive surge to 58,268 visits. That’s more than double and it was also a weekend.
Entertainmentwise told a similar story with 29,537 visits reported on the Saturday with a big jump to 58,850 visits on the Sunday.
I sometimes get so snowed under that planning for stuff that rarely happens can get knocked down a long to do list, but it just goes to show that it’s worth Being Prepared for things like this as no doubt we’ve opened up to a few new users.