NEWS: Going viral without going down

Going viral without going down June 20, 2008

This guest post was written by Saran Chari, CTO and co-founder of Flixster. Flixster is a Lightspeed portfolio company.
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As the social web evolves and platforms like Facebook and MySpace open up to applications, many companies and developers are rushing to get distribution to their millions of users by “going viral”. For the successful applications, this can often present a problem (a high-quality one for sure) – how do you actually scale your deployment to handle that growth?

At Flixster, we’ve been riding this growth curve for 2 years now – first with our destination site itself (www.flixster.com), and subsequently on our embedded applications on Facebook and MySpace. Across our properties, we now have over 1 million users logging in each day and we are approaching our 2 billionth movie rating. Like many others, we started out with just a single virtual server in a shared hosting environment. So how did we scale to where we are today?...