Hello, I'm fairly new to linode and had great success trasitioning our websites over. We run air shows and, for the most part, the web traffic is very low except during the shows where traffic increases 10 fold. For example, for the last show, we might have averaged 40 people on the site at once leading up the the show, but when the jets started flying we peaked at over 400 active users at once. Our primary linode is a 1024, so for the show I added a second linode and used a nodebalancer. This worked fine and I kind of think we couldv'e gotten by without it. But this was in a small city. My real question is what happens when we do a show in NYC and say 20,000 users hit the site at once. What should I do to prepare for that? Is it better to load balance multiple smaller linodes or should I just add one big linode? Is the load capability linear as you go up? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

If you're not requiring "state" to be shared (eg not running a blog where comments need to be visible) and just serving up mostly consistent pages then I'd recommend lots of smaller nodes with a load balancer because it's easier to add a small node for a month or so (per hour charges) than it is to shrink a linode afterwards. Also if you find you're getting timeouts you can then add additional nodes pretty quickly.

(With the API and scripting it could be almost programmatic).

EDIT: you might also want to look at some of the free CDNs as a front-end content delivery network, such as cloudflare

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Rgds
Stephen
(Linux user since kernel version 0.11)