Are you able to scale up your site in a few minutes ?

On the 20th januari, Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States of America. Google has published statistics about the impact of the inauguration on the search activities. As a web site owner, you need to be prepared to handle the extra traffic to your site during these events. Here an example of the increased number of searches for people who where part of the inauguration.

I think Google did a good job, the search was functioning very well during and after the inauguration.

What happens in the world can have impact on your site. This also applies to actions executed by your company. For instance an e-mail to a group of customers or prospects. Planning of these activities should be done in cooperation with your web site administrator. Your site should be able to handle all traffic as a result of your mailing. To handle all traffic after an emailing, you should be able to scale up your site temporarily. Monitoring of your own site traffic and the usage of the underlying hardware is essential for this.

Are you able to scale up your web in  a few minutes if needed?