The ABC television show Extreme Makeover, Home Edition, displays severe spikes in its Web site traffic as each home reconstruction gets underway, builds up cadres of volunteers and onlookers, and then airs Sunday evenings on the ABC network.

When Extreme Makeover arrived in Philo, Ill., however, Web developer Cybernautic decided it was time for an extreme makeover of the show's Web site. A unique site is built for each show. Each project forms connections to the area where the home reconstruction will occur by involving platoons of volunteer re-furbishers, neighbors and onlookers. A local builder often sponsors the site.

Cybernautic, a design firm in nearby Normal, Ill., got the nod to overhaul the site for the Oct. 25 show.

For the Philo reconstruction, Cybernautic CEO Chad Parker met with the show's producers and asked what he should expect in the way of traffic. "You will need to make sure you have an unlimited supply of beer and pizza for your network administrator," he was told by executive producer, Conrad Ricketts. It would be the administrator's job to reboot the site repeatedly for several days as it crashed from spikes in traffic, he explained. Ricketts told him, "Every site we have done for this season has crashed," Parker said in an interview.

Parker had one week to get a site up and running in a highly scalable fashion. He looked at his current servers with his clients' 200 Web sites hosted on them. They were supported by a dedicated host supplier, The Planet. He envisioned all of his customers' Web sites crashing as spikes in Extreme Makeover traffic hit the servers. He decided he needed another solution.

"If our servers went down for five minutes during the Makeover episode, the phones would have rung off the hook. It would be pandemonium around here," said Parker, who was already working 18 hours a day trying to pull together all the necessary elements for a new, scalable site. He didn't relish the prospect.

"I considered a dedicated server at The Planet, but the cost would have gone through the roof" over the several months that the site needed to be maintained, even after the heavy traffic had departed, he said.

Instead he opted to launch the Web site on Rackspace Cloud servers. Rackspace would monitor traffic to all its servers, keeping a buffer of surplus capacity on hand at all times. More servers could be plugged in as needed and if circumstances warranted, Rackspace would spin up additional virtual servers to keep response times short, no matter how many visitors decided to use the Extreme Makeover site.

"I didn't want to have to restart 15 times a day remotely (The Planet runs data centers in Dallas and Houston)," Parker explained. It was unclear to him that a cloud service would be elastic enough to keep up with Extreme Makeover traffic, even though it portrayed itself as a scalable resource. But he talked to Rackspace technical support, examined its data center resources, looked at its client list and tried a few simple tests.