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Nov. 4, 2008, 12:34 p.m.

Will web servers buckle under the traffic?

Rich Miller at the blog Data Center Knowledge — I’m sure you’re all reading it on a daily basis anyway — has a good post about how news web sites are prepping for the onslaught of traffic coming tonight. Three highlights:

— He seems to hint at potential trouble for FiveThirtyEight and other sites “hosted on platforms known primarily for their affordability.” In other words, sites that don’t pay big bucks for hard-core servers and instead rely on free/cheap options like Google’s Blogger.

— Rich points to this real-time graph from Akamai (who sells bandwidth to a lot of news sites), which should track global web traffic minute-by-minute tonight. See if it can break the record set during the ’06 World Cup.

— According to The New York Times, Yahoo actually saw much bigger traffic the day after the 2004 election than the day of: 142 million page views versus 80 million. So if your server avoids meltdown tonight, don’t necessarily think the worst is over.

Joshua Benton is the senior writer and former director of Nieman Lab. You can reach him via email (joshua_benton@harvard.edu) or Twitter DM (@jbenton).
POSTED     Nov. 4, 2008, 12:34 p.m.
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