Over half of million people visited Malaysiakini on election night last Saturday as the results were announced.
The traffic was so high at 11pm, that the ‘Malaysiakini.com’ domain was blocked by the company in United States which hosts the website’s domain name.
“We were well prepared for the anticipated traffic despite that Malaysiakini was made free. We put in additional servers, stripped down our page to make it lighter and faster to download and we have six mirror sites …

Load balancing is the even distribution of computer processing and communication activities so that a server is not overwhelmed. Load balancing is especially important for networks where it is difficult to predict the number of requests that will be issued to a server.
Busy Web sites typically employ two or more Web servers in a load-balancing scheme. If one server starts to get swamped, requests are forwarded to another server with more capacity. Load balancing is therefore a service that is employed on more sophisticated site deployments.
Most service providers that offer …