[With over 30,000 new pledgers since the 300i promotion,] that's got to present some challenges with the website. How's the website handling all the new people, and what do we have coming up?
TL;DRThe site hit heavy load after the livestream, and the team added capacity from eight web servers to about 20 within roughly an hour, after which it ran smoothly.
Well, it's great. When we started the livestream, right after you pushed that red button, we had some problems. We had just an incredible amount of load on the site as everybody was refreshing the page, loading the images, migrating their accounts. It took us about an hour. We added a lot more capacity to the website on the back-end servers, which is actually something we can do on the new site that we couldn't do on the old site. That's a big deal. So it took us about an hour to get up to the amount of hardware for the load.
Which was what? What did we plan for?
It's all technical stuff, right? But on the back end, we had eight web servers at launch. And based on the loads that we saw on the old site, we thought that was more than we would ever need, right? And what we ended up needing was about 20. So the demand far exceeded even our expectations. After we got that worked out, it took us about an hour to roll up those additional servers. Everything has been smooth as silk ever since.