How Weather Sites Prepare for Hurricane Season

Data Center Knowledge interviews the operators of three weather sites on what they do to prepare for hurricane-related traffic spikes. The piece is filled with interesting tidbits. For example, on February 9th (a.k.a. the Second North American Blizzard of 2010), The Weather Channel broke its single-day traffic record with 178 million page views. Crazy. The following is a snippet describing how Stormpulse operates:

Stormpulse is a fast-growing site known for its use of rich graphics and maps to provide detailed data on the path and strength of storms. With daily traffic ranging from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of visitors, uses cloud computing to serve up its site. Stormpulse is a customer of Amazon's EC2 and S3 services, according to co-founder Matthew Wensing.

"Our infrastructure is designed with spikes in mind," said Wensing. "All of our back-end computations (data collection, aggregation, and image-processing jobs) happen on separate servers from our customer-facing machines. We cache everything and use the best open-source caching software available.

Read the full story at Data Center Knowledge.