http://www.hotornot.com) learned this lesson the hard way. Overnight, their traffic went through the roof. In response, they had to spend a fair amount of time and effort figuring out how to manage (and pay for) the traffic their site generated.
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Popularity often comes at a high price, especially on-line where news, fads, links, and word-of-mouth literally spread at the speed of light. The creators of the popular “Hot or Not” site (http://www.hotornot.com) learned this lesson the hard way. Overnight, their traffic went through the roof. In response, they had to spend a fair amount of time and effort figuring out how to manage (and pay for) the traffic their site generated.
Popularity often comes at a high price, especially on-line where news, fads, links, and word-of-mouth literally spread at the speed of light. The creators of the popular “Hot or Not” site (http://www.hotornot.com) learned this lesson the hard way. Overnight, their traffic went through the roof. In response, they had to spend a fair amount of time and effort figuring out how to manage (and pay for) the traffic their site generated.
Like “Hot or Not,” you never know when your site might get posted on Slashdot or hyped in one of those “You’ve got to see this site!” email messages. If you have a bandwidth cap or pay increasingly high rates for connectivity, a traffic surge can burn lots of real cash in a real hurry.
The traditional solution to handling traffic surges is to throttle traffic on the network — often at the router. While effective, reconfiguring a router typically requires you to get in touch with your ISP or hosting provider and convince them to implement the necessary throttling. All the while, your bill grows larger and larger. Even worse, if you hit a bandwidth cap, your entire site can effectively be taken off-line.
Rather than depending on someone else to solve your traffic problems, you can take matters into your own hands and install the Apache module mod_throttle. mod_throttle allows you to build custom bandwidth and connection rate policies for individual files and directories and entire servers.
To understand why mod_throttle is so…
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