SuperBowl commercials are big and getting bigger every year. I always look forward to the work of creative minds at various Agencies trying to outdo eachother, even to the point of anticipating commercials during the game.
It may be the one time of year everyone leaves the fast forward button alone.
And, it works. At least according to Scott Keogh, chief marketing officer, Audi of America.
“In short, the Super Bowl has worked. The brand has never been stronger, market share is increasing and we are setting the stage to increase our momentum in 2010″
If the campaign has a significant web component, the issue that many Agencies face is the last link in a long chain: “where do we put this web site/app?”
All the creative work, development, and back forth with the client is over, so where can you put this baby so that it flies?
Traditional hosting (even robust dedicated hosting) is often just not up to the task of handling the millions of pageviews and pairs of eyeballs that are inevitable with a SuperBowl spot.
Cloud Hosting, which is defined by its ability to scale on demand as the resources are needed, is a perfect fit. It can handle all the traffic you could possibly throw at it, and when the traffic goes away your resources scale back down.
Rackspace Cloud offers three distinct offerings to handle a massive SuperBowl traffic spike:
CloudSites – a “platform as a service” that we manage for you. You literally load the site and watch it scale, and only pay for the resources you use. If your traffic spike lasts one day, you only pay for that day’s intense resource usage.
CloudServers – Instantly provision Linux servers on the fly, and add as many as you need. You have full root access to do whatever you need. As an example, Encoding.com runs about 80 CloudServers on any given day, but may scale up to 1000 during peak loads. That’s flexibility.
CloudFiles - Load up your files and get World Class Content Delivery through Limelight Networks. This is perfect for large video assets, as it frees up your primary hosting environment.
Hosting is changing, and Cloud is leading the charge.
If you want to chat about Cloud Hosting for your SuperBowl campaign, I can be reached at 210-312-5526 or devin.elder@rackspace.com
2 Comments
I’ve used cloud sites before and they are great. And whilst I understand the theory that they scale out “on demand” how hard have they actually been tested? How far and fast can they actually scale in practice? Do you have a case study or test report that show them scaling at a super bowl rate?
Hi Neil, great question. There are some great case studies for all 3 Cloud products here: http://www.rackspacecloud.com/who_uses_cloud_computing