{"id":39,"date":"2026-08-05T10:26:29","date_gmt":"2026-08-05T10:26:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/demos.canvaswp.com\/hosting\/2026\/08\/05\/fable-books-survived-a-40x-traffic-spike-on-launch-day\/"},"modified":"2026-08-05T10:26:29","modified_gmt":"2026-08-05T10:26:29","slug":"fable-books-survived-a-40x-traffic-spike-on-launch-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/demos.canvaswp.com\/hosting\/2026\/08\/05\/fable-books-survived-a-40x-traffic-spike-on-launch-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Fable Books survived a 40x traffic spike on launch day"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"lead\">An independent publisher with a modest, steady audience had one title picked up by a national broadcaster. They had four hours of warning.<\/p><h3 class=\"ls-0\">The problem<\/h3><p>Their usual traffic was around 2,000 visits a day on a small shared plan. The broadcast segment put 80,000 people on the site in ninety minutes, most of them landing on the same product page.<\/p><h3 class=\"ls-0\">What we did<\/h3><p>The site was already on Canvas, so the fix was a vertical resize and a cache rule rather than a migration. We scaled the instance from two cores to eight, forced full-page caching on the product page for anonymous visitors, and put a load balancer in front with a second node.<\/p><ul class=\"iconlist iconlist-color ms-0\"><li>Peak concurrent visitors: 6,400<\/li><li>Requests served: 1.2 million in two hours<\/li><li>Errors returned: none<\/li><li>Time from call to scaled: 11 minutes<\/li><\/ul><h3 class=\"ls-0\">Afterwards<\/h3><p>They scaled back down to a CX21 two days later and were billed for the hours at the larger size, which came to under nine dollars.<\/p><h3 class=\"ls-0\">In their words<\/h3><p>&quot;We spent four hours panicking and eleven minutes fixing it. The bill for the biggest day in our history was less than lunch.&quot;<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Four hours&#8217; warning, 80,000 visitors in ninety minutes, and eleven minutes from the phone call to a scaled instance. No errors served.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":78,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[31,33],"class_list":["post-39","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-customer-stories","tag-customer-story","tag-scaling"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/demos.canvaswp.com\/hosting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/demos.canvaswp.com\/hosting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/demos.canvaswp.com\/hosting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demos.canvaswp.com\/hosting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demos.canvaswp.com\/hosting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/demos.canvaswp.com\/hosting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demos.canvaswp.com\/hosting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/78"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/demos.canvaswp.com\/hosting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demos.canvaswp.com\/hosting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demos.canvaswp.com\/hosting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}