Quote Originally Posted by Craig Beckta
Can you go into a little more detail.

I have a dedicated server so far, a
Standard package with Hostgator.

Charles is supposed to put a tutorial video
together for Amazon S3 but could you explain
grid hosting a little more.

Craig

Grid hosting is basically just load balanced hosting, what happens with launches is that so many people are trying to get in to read the sales page or whatever and the server gets clogged up with too many connections. Even if you shoved 8 cpu's and 16gb of ram in your server apache still won't be able to handle 15,000 connections at once.

But apache is able to handle 3,000 connections a lot easier, this is where the grid hosting steps in. What it basically does is allow you to take your site and then distribute it among 5 other servers or however many you need so that there aren't too many connections to each one.

You guys should also check out this post about how "Diggproof" a wordpress blog to handle large amounts of traffic. The same tweaks could be applied to any other web application http://blog.circlesixdesign.com/2007/01/22/diggproof/