codyg1985’s Think Tank

If a website is ever posted on the popular technology site Slashdot.org, the host had better get ready to handle the amount of traffic that hits the site. In many cases, so much traffic visits the site that the website will grind to a halt or not function at all until the “excitement” wears off.

The solution to this problem: create a site that looks exactly like slashdot.org, but links to archived images of the linked story instead of the actual website:

Mirrordot works by picking up the Slashdot news feed, creating a blog-like page with all the same articles and links. The only difference is that on Mirrordot when you click on a link, instead of going to Forbes.com, for example, you’ll end up at the snapshot picked up by Mirrordot at the time the original Slashdot story was posted.

Jay Jacobson says that he and his partner Erik Stephens aren’t looking to get rich and famous. They don’t charge for the mirroring service and pay for the large bandwidth requirements out of their own pockets. They’ve even been approached by “a couple of other sites to mirror them,” Jacobson says, “but we haven’t really done that. Our initial intention was to make a statement and prove a point, not to build a business.” In fact, Jacobson and Stephens already own a business, called EdgeOS, that provides managed vulnerability assessment services.

Source: NewsForge