I had noticed that earlier on in that day he had responded to a post on uknot by someone looking for some server capacity as their web site had gotten very popular due to a comment made some where about Victoria Beckham is as interesting to watch as cheese mature! So people decided to go watch cheese maturing. The problem being the people hosting the cheese maturing website never expected it to get so popular (I can’t imagine why!).

So the boss called a few hours after work asking if we could provision some servers in a hurry for this customer, which with Flexiscale is not a problem, I pressed the buttons in the customer control panel and was able to give the customer 5 servers all with 1Gbps connections to the internet in under an hour with a LAMP stack installed. The excellent thing about this, not only did it take no effort on our part, and with the upcoming API won’t take any of our effort) but the customer was able to solve their short term resource problem quickly at a very low cost.

With luck I am hoping that this change in the cost model should totally change the business model of most web companies. For example, at Christmas here in the UK and in the USA when the stores start to get busier they start to hire in Christmas temps, however for small companies who have a web site hiring the same equivlent “website Christmas temps” is nearly impossible. However now with utility computing being pushed by the likes of Amazon, ServePath and FlexiScale it should get a lot easier.

The end result is that the customer was happy from what I understand and people got to watch cheese mature, to hear what the customer said have a look here.