What do you do when you have regular traffic spike? Say, for once a month, traffic increases 3 fold for 12 hours after your company sent out the monthly news letter? Your current web server barely copes with regular load. Do you go out to buy 2 more dedicated servers just for that 12 hours in a month? That wouldn’t be too economical paying 2 extra servers sitting there idling most of the time, wouldn’t it?

Judd Vinet of ArchLinux (one of my favourite, btw) has recently written an article to solve this very issue, Web clustering with Amazon EC2, where extra servers are hired from Amazon EC2 on part-time basis to serve surge in traffic. A semi-automated system has been built to make the task of “summoning new servers” much easier, and has been discussed in the article.

Via TechCrunch, MediaTemple has introduced its Grid-Server hosting product, superseding their old shared hosting products.

It is basically a cluster of web servers/application servers connecting to a fast array of storage (SAN?), and load balancers or routers placed in front of the web servers to evenly distribute the requests across individual physical servers in the grid. A new measurement, Grid Performance Unit, is introduced to measure how much CPU time your account has used.

Michael Arrington has also interviewed the MediaTemple guys on TalkCrunch, talking about the ideas behind their latest offerings.

An interesting article written by Isabel Wang, The Future of Dedicated Servers, where she discussed whether the rise of Google and Microsoft Live and their abundant resources might make the dedicated server market obsolete, when people are switched to on-demand hosting.