Flash Crowd crushes web server!

Friday’s New York Times had a fascinating article focusing on the work of Robert Ryang at New York post production house PS260. Robert created a reworked trailer for Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, as an entry for a competition being run by the New York chapter of the Association of Independent Creative Editors. The new trailer is a wonderful piece of work, but when word of the trailer spread across the Internet, it’s popularity had the almost inevitable results - PS260’s web servers almost crashed under the load. These ‘flash crowds’ are not limited to smaller websites, on September 11th 2001, both MSNBC and CNN services were severely hampered by the sudden traffic. The good news is that open Content Distribution Networks like Coral and CoDeeN are available today to address this issue for even the smallest websites. Give them a try, your readers will thank you!