Flosoft.biz behind the scenes of LeWeb.net

It’s been an amazing week for us here at Flosoft.biz. We were happy and honoured to be a part of LeWeb 2011, Europe’s biggest IT conference with over 3.000 attendees in Paris and more than 200.000 participants online over the conference days.

Hosting the LeWeb.net website was a challenge for us. And we want to share some of the things that went on behind the scenes of the website and what it meant for us to host it with you. It’s not every day that you get to host the official website of Europe’s most influential IT conference.

We always like a challenge, so when we were approached by the LeWeb team about hosting their website, we didn’t think twice about it. We discussed with the organizers a custom configuration of our managed hosting solution that was optimized for the LeWeb website and deployed it on one of our dedicated servers. Our professional approach worked 100% for LeWeb. We also set up a few additional resources in case we needed them. This was based on our DedicatedCloud solution. We were basically using additional frontend servers that could be fired up.

The setup was:

• 1x Dedicated Pro Hybrid as the production environment
• DedicatedCloud image ready and 2 deployed on stand-by. (weren’t used)

Come December 7, the first day of the conference, we had a peak of over 200 requests per second! coming in on the single dedicated machine, yet the machine load didn’t go over 0.1. This just goes to show that we at Flosoft.biz can have a single dedicated server (and a fallback infrastructure that we didn’t need…) handle more or less anything if we optimize the website and the webserver.

Here are some graphs and numbers we’ve gathered over the course of this week:

Requests for the week of LeWeb

The server handled 226.564 unique IPs. That means that over 226.564 unique users visited the site between 07/Dec/2011 00:00:00 CET and 09/Dec/2011 23:59:59 CET, assuming that there’s quite a few people behind a single IP (NATing). This is a huge number, and we don’t dare to speculate.

We also had a peak of 20.1Mbit/s of outgoing traffic on that machine.

The LeWeb.net network traffic graph

It was a great week for all of us here at Flosoft.biz, and we’re really looking forward to next year. We’d like to thank Loïc and Geraldine and the entire LeWeb team for organizing the most professional IT event in Europe and getting together for open discussion many of the worlds leading thinkers of our time and letting Flosoft.biz be part of this.

We hope to see you next year!

Florian Jensen & Claus E. Kraemer

Note: Some numbers aren’t showing on the graphs, as the graphs show a 5 minute average, not 1 minute average. Figures are as stated in the text.