(Obligatory preface: For the better part of the last 4 years I’ve spent my days (and nights) installing, configuring, and tweaking servers that power one of the more trafficked political sites on the web. It all started with one Windows box and ended with eight LAMP servers, load balancing, firewalls, database replication, and enough Ethernet cables to circle the earth a few times over. The result: 150 page views per second and 300 Mbps, without breaking too much of a sweat.)

“Our website is getting hit with too much traffic. What do we do now?” CEOs, managers, and tech dudes have all asked this question a thousand times. Being in the business of server hosting, we’re asked this question every day. So, we thought it might be helpful to take you through the lifecycle of scaling a website – from shared hosting, to dedicated hosting, to managed hosting.

It’s easy to argue that shared hosting is the simplest way to get a website up and running. Pricing usually starts under $10, and the setup is fairly straightforward and automated. When a few weeks or months go by with no problems, you become confident that the masters of the Internet have finally made it so that website hosting “just works.” But then you publish a video of your pet poodle wearing tights and dancing to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and your website becomes an internet sensation. Then it crashes, and words like “DoS” and “hack” start getting thrown around. You break out into a cold sweat and find yourself running around like a squirrel in traffic.

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