Castfire

Many sites worry about the Digg effect — their traffic can be overwhelming. We have always built with the mindset of having all of customers getting Dugg at the same time and it has worked like a charm. Yesterday, however, we got the true Digg effect: Federated Media is running video ads through Castfire ON Digg. Instantly, our system monitors alerted all of us that the system was starting to perform slowly under the increased load. Uh oh…feels scary!

It was at that moment that I was happy I followed the lead of our friends at Dogster and had retained Laine Campbell from Palomino DB. In our hurried conference call, with everyone throwing out suggestions, she calmly identified the issue and suggested a simple, elegant solution. With her assistance, we had the fix in 30 minutes later and the all of the servers were back to no load and humming along. Laine has quickly become a part of the Castfire team and works with us not as a consultant, but a full member of the team.

If you are a startup looking at growth and scaling, I pass on the same recommendation that Dogster did: contact Laine! She is uber responsible and quite the wizard. Thanks to Dogster and Laine!