Dries Buytaert

This week's Grammy Awards is one of the best examples of the high traffic events websites that Acquia is so well known for. This marks the fourth time we hosted the Grammys' website. We saw close to 5 million unique visitors requesting nearly 20 million pages on the day of the awards and the day after. From television's Emmys to Superbowl advertisers' sites, Acquia has earned its reputation for keeping their Drupal sites humming during the most crushing peaks of traffic.

These "super spikes" aren't always fun. For the developers building these sites to the producers updating each site during the event, nothing compares to the sinking feeling when a site fails when it is needed the most. During the recent Superbowl, one half-time performer lost her website (not on Drupal), giving fans the dreaded 503 Service Unavailable error message. According to CMSWire: "Her website was down well past midnight for those who wanted to try and score tickets for her tour, announced just after her halftime show performance". Yet for Bruno Mars' fans, his Acquia-based Drupal site kept rolling even as millions flooded his site during the half-time performance.

For the Grammys, we can plan ahead and expand their infrastructure prior to the event. This is easy thanks to Acquia Cloud's elastic platform capacity. Our technical account managers and support teams work with the producers at the Grammys to make sure the right infrastructure and configuration is in place. Specifically, we simulate award night traffic as best we can, and use load testing to prepare the infrastructure accordingly. If needed, we add additional server capacity during the event itself. Just prior to the event, Acquia takes a 360 degree look at the site to ensure that all of the stakeholders are aligned, whether internal to Acquia or external at a partner. We have technical staff on site during the event, and remote teams that provide around the clock coverage before and after the event.

Few people know what goes on behind the scenes during these super spikes, but the biggest source of pride is that our work is often invisible; our job well done means that our customer's best day, didn't turn into their worst day.