Moog Music: Staying online when Google doodles you

On May 23, 2012, Google celebrated Bob Moog's birthday with an interactive doodle, leading to increased traffic for MoogMusic.com. The site was initially designed to handle half a million hits per day but underwent several improvements by web developers PurpleCat.net to increase its capacity. Upon the doodle going live in Australia and the embargo being lifted, MoogMusic.com went behind CloudFlare's protection. Although initial traffic was manageable, as the sun rose in Asia, errors started to appear due to the site's VPS being overwhelmed. Through the use of Page Rules and advanced caching, CloudFlare managed to serve 92% of requests directly from its infrastructure, reducing bandwidth usage by over 90%. As a result, MoogMusic.com is now averaging more than 100 requests per second, with traffic every 15 minutes exceeding the VPS's designed capacity for an entire day.