Increased traffic on 24Sveriges servers

Local newspaper 24Sverige, with local news sites around Sweden, is breaking new visitor records and Rackfish servers are keeping up.

24Sverige runs a local news site in Uppsala where Rackfish is based, 24Uppsala.se, but is also located in Västerås, Malmö and many other cities. Total traffic broke records in Week 18 with nearly 2.2 million page views. However, for those of us who manage the server operation for 24Sverige, this went unnoticed, it is precisely this type of performance peaks that we built our platform for and unlike many other cloud providers, other customers are not affected by this increased traffic, as Rackfish has chosen to isolate and not overbook resources, which are otherwise standard in the industry.

24Sverige has cloud servers with a fixed price. This makes it easy to budget and anticipate costs, while allowing for quick change if necessary, but avoids a cold shower when the bill arrives. Rackfish also sells hourly cloud servers for customers who need flexibility or want to check the configuration in detail themselves.

For 24Sverige, Rackfish delivers a server solution of two servers one for the web pages and one for underlying systems. In addition, we have a warehouse in front of the servers that handles traffic and intermediates for higher performance.

24Sverige uses Rackfish “high-availability servers” – servers with automatic high availability. This means that we have reserved double the capacity of the customer’s servers. If a server goes down (for example, by actually breaking it), it will immediately restart and resume operations, and that capacity is always free and waiting. We use the same technology when maintaining servers. When we mark for service, customer servers automatically move away, without it being noticed, in order to completely eliminate service disruptions.

Thanks to Rackfish’s very high reliability, for example, all 24Sverige servers have 100% uptime in 2019. This means that our measurement systems have not even perceived a slight hiccup in operation. We have built to avoid individual events being able to affect operations. If the switchgear in the mains, diesel generator, battery backup or power supply in servers or other equipment goes wrong, it is in reserve. If the wrong network cable is pulled out, there is a backup. If an internet service provider or external connection has problems, there are several others. If the server itself breaks, there are automatic reserves and so on.

The key to Rackfish’s high performance is that we do not overbook our resources, you can trust that the performance you purchased will be delivered and you do not suffer from “noisy-neighbors” or “cpu-steal”. We have equipment that optimizes traffic between several leading internet operators and in addition, our servers are really fast. When customers move away from the large public clouds, they can often significantly reduce the number of servers while maintaining or improving performance.