Developing a Celebrity Website

Optiem, a long standing Infinitely Virtual partner, chose IV to host the new official website of LeBron James. For their development environment they purchased two Platinum+ Virtual Dedicated Servers, one running Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Standard Edition, and firewall protection for each server. We placed the servers in a private VLAN behind our Juniper firewall cluster. This gave them a dedicated web server and a dedicated SQL server.

development team, determined that we should be able to sustain the first day's massive traffic by increasing the web server's and SQL server's CPU and RAM. We also worked out a contingency plan if this configuration proved inadequate.

Deep Concerns

Prior to launch, Optiem's development department communicated their concern that they did not have enough RAM, CPU and bandwidth to proceed with this celebrity website launch. In many cases, celebrity website launches are mired in performance issues, and the last thing they wanted was to have the new site repeatedly crash on the go-live day.

Go Live

Infinitely Virtual, working with Optiem's

Contingency Plan

We were nearly certain that the new server configuration was more than adequate, but more than one celebrity site launches have gone awry because of how impossible it is to accurately project traffic. On the day of the launch, we determined we could, within minutes, increase either or both server's RAM to 16 GB and the CPU core count to 8. If this upgrade proved inadequate, we could quickly hot-clone the web server and load-balance them. We could, within minutes, create as many

clones as traffic demanded.

Moment of Truth

Launch day proceeded smoothly. In the first hour, the web server transmitted 60 mbps downstream traffic. Both the web server and the SQL server operated flawlessly. During the peak hours, we periodically tested web server performance. Pages displayed smoothly, videos streamed smoothly, and Optiem has since expressed their appreciation for a job well done.