Surviving yahoo's frontage and App Store featured listing

[Seo Townsend]

I am a developer at fittr, we make a fitness app that was recently featured on the yahoo homepage and app store top featured listings.

We are a very small company with a small budget.  We were not prepared for the onslaught of traffic we recieved from the iStore and yahoo homepage out of the blue; fortunately, FreeBSD was.  We
have two low costs FreeBSD servers (4GB 4 core, $60/mo) from rackspace which are both running relatively complicated dynamic web applications along with a redis database.  During the peak of our traffic,
both FreeBSD servers were serving all web pages within 15ms and all services within 3ms without a hitch, load peaked at 23%.  Stack consisting of nginx, rails (web), sinatra (services), redis (database).

There’s a reason FreeBSD runs 1/3 of the internet.