TL;DR
TL;DR
Going viral is exciting but dangerous. Prepare for 100x traffic, aggressive abuse, and intense scrutiny. Ensure auto-scaling works, rate limiting is aggressive, abuse reporting exists, and you have people ready to respond. The best viral moments don't become security incidents.
Scale Preparation 5
Abuse Prevention 5
Incident Response 5
Can I really prepare for going viral?
You can prepare for the technical challenges. Load test at 100x, have aggressive caching and rate limiting, and ensure someone is monitoring. You can't predict virality, but you can be ready.
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What's the most common viral failure?
Database connection exhaustion. Your app scales but your database doesn't. Use connection pooling, read replicas, and aggressive caching to protect your database.
Should I rate limit during a viral moment?
Yes. It's better to rate limit some users than to go down entirely. Aggressive rate limiting keeps the site up for most users. You can always loosen limits once the spike passes.
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Ready for Viral Traffic
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