[humorix] ISP Offers Slashdot Effect Insurance

[James Baughn <jbaughn@xxxxxxx>]

ISP Offers Slashdot Effect Insurance
September 7, 2004

Desperate for a promotional gimmick, the founder of
eOnlineCheapLinuxHostingWorld.com has decided to offer
low-cost "Slashdot Effect Insurance" to all customers.  For
an extra US$1 per month, customers will not be liable for
sudden surges in traffic, even if they shatter their
bandwidth quota.

"The Slashdot Effect is one of the most pressing issues
facing webmasters today," said Eric Fivalak.  "You never know
when it's going to strike, and you never know how much money
you will have to fork over in bandwidth charges. But we've
found a way to eliminate this hideous demon."

As part of the insurance plan, the company will also maintain
a standalone backup server that will only kick in during a
Category 2 or worse Slashdot Effect.  If a strike is
detected, the victim's site will be offloaded to the server,
ensuring that all other sites hosted by the company will be
unaffected by the onslaught.

"The last time Taco Boy decided to link to a customer's site,
one of our webservers had a load average of around 10000.0.
With the extra server, that shouldn't happen again..."

However, Fivalak admitted, "We've never actually experienced
a Category 5 Slashdot Effect [on the Malda-Bates Scale], so
all bets are off in such a scenario..."


---

THE MALDA-BATES SLASHDOT EFFECT INTENSITY SCALE

Category 0: Neglible impact (1-1,000 unique visitors per day
from Slashdot)
  - Usually the result of a minor link embedded in a comment
    posted in response to a story
  - Rarely detected unless the webmaster carefully studies
    the server logs and says, "Now isn't this interesting..."

Category 1: Noticeable but minor impact (1,001-5,000)
  - Often caused by an indirect link from another site
    pummeled with a Category 3+ attack
  - Little impact on performance, but may cause sites with
    certain ISPs to approach their bandwidth quota

Category 2: Strong impact (5,001-20,000)
  - Direct link from a story not on the Slashdot front page
  - IIS webservers begin to struggle
  - Slight chance of bandwidth overages

Category 3: Severe impact (20,001-75,000)
  - Direct link from a regular Slashdot story
  - 40% chance of failure of IIS servers; 3% chance of
    failure of dynamic sites with poorly implemented PHP
    scripts
  - Moderate probability of exceeding bandwidth quotas with
    many ISPs

Category 4: Disastrous impact (75,000-200,000)
  - Direct links from two or more duplicated Slashdot stories
    within the same day
  - 99% chance of IIS failures
  - 2% chance of hardware failures (CPUs overheating and
    melting, hard drives crashing)
  - Good chance of saturating a T1 line
  - You don't even want to think about bandwidth usage

Category 5: Cataclysmic impact (200,001+)
  - Direct link from a controversial story that is then
    duplicated on Slashdot at the same time that hundreds of
    thousands of blog sites discuss it
  - T1 lines obliterated; T3 lines not much better
  - 10% chance of hardware meltdowns
  - Total bandwidth usage measured in terabytes (at best) or
    petabytes (at worst)


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