For better or worse, most of you have probably heard of Justin Bieber by now.
Besides being a teenage pop music phenomenon, he is also one of the most influential celebrities when it comes to social media. He has 11.2 million followers on his Twitter acount, and his Facebook fan page is currently at 33.3 million 'likes'.
So what happens to your website when someone like Bieber decides to tweet about LA traffic and include a picture on the photo sharing service Instagram?
Well, two things:
- You gain tons of free press, users, and app downloads - which is awesome.
- Your servers nearly melt from the massive spike in volume - which is not so awesome.
This is the IDEAL scenario for where CloudFlare can help sites like Instagram avoid a complete meltdown when their 'Bieber Effect' moment happens.
You see, CloudFlare has 2 key competencies - our cloud-based service make websites faster and more secure. On average, websites using our service load twice as fast, use 60% less bandwidth, and serve 65% fewer requests.
One of the many ways that we do this is via our globally distributed CDN,
which caches static content (including photos), and manages the serving of this content for you. This means that for the majority of the requests for Beiber's LA traffic photo would have been handled by CloudFlare's servers and not Instagram's, saving Instagram for the headache and costs of dealing with such a massive spike.
Not bad, considering that it's all for free.
The best part is that all of this can be accomplished through a signup and setup process which lasts 5 minutes or less.
So take a moment and sign up for CloudFlare today, before your website has its own 'Bieber Effect' moment and it's too late!