Dragon’s Den: A Lesson in Autoscaling

UK prime time TV show Dragon’s Den can teach us all a lesson in website preservation…

The Sunday night showing of Dragon’s Den attracts 2.9 million UK viewers every week. So, even those entrepreneurs that get the ‘I’m Out’ treatment can’t really be considered as losers. That is, unless they’ve got rubbish web hosting.

Last year, the Marketing Communications Report by UK communications regulator Ofcom revealed that more than a third of television viewers surf the Internet while they’re watching their favourite shows. Some use their smartphones or iPads to access social media to tweet or comment on the programme they’re watching. A further 16 percent, meanwhile, use their connected devices to find out more about the people or products they’re watching. This new generation multi-tasking is called media meshing.

And it’s this media meshing that caused the website of one den-hopeful to crash on Sunday night. At 26 minutes past eight, last Sunday, Akeem Ojuko entered the den to present his pitch for investment in his flavoured peanut butter company, Wild Peanut. By 28 minutes past the hour, his website was inaccessible.

If we use the Ofcom statistics as a guide, a possible 870,000 people reached for their iPads and laptops at 8.26pm on Sunday night, ready to have a nosy at the Wild Peanut website. This would have tested the bandwidth and CPU power of Akeem’s web hosting package to the max. Unfortunately, the website failed that test.

This wouldn’t have been the case if Wild Peanut’s website had been hosted on the cloud. If Akeem had a VPS cloud hosting package, he could have accommodated the additional website traffic using his pre-set autoscaling ability. Before the show aired, he could have specified a bundle of extra resources, needed to accommodate the increased interest in his site. And, when the viewers started flooding in, his cloud capacity would have grown to meet the need.

Akeem’s is not the only website that’s fallen foul of server capacity recently. A few Wednesdays ago, an advert for Vegas Spas, an inflatable hot tub company aired on primetime TV. Seconds after the commercial started, the Vegas Spa website had crashed. The typical peak TV advert costs up to £90,000. Auto-scaling cost as little as $10 a month – you do the maths.

The moral of this story? Never meet a dragon without auto-scaling your server.