Woot.com chooses aiCache Web Accelerator instances running on the Amazon EC2 cloud to manage traffic spikes. Woot.com is a well known online e-tailer, famous for creating the “one day one item sale” business model. Woot’s main website offers one discounted product each day, often a piece of computer hardware or an electronic gadget.
Periodically Woot announces a “Woot-Off”, a short term frenzied mutation of the product posting procedure. In Woot-Off mode, a new product is launched immediately after the sellout of the previous deal. As the news about Woot-offs goes viral in just a few short minutes, traffic to Woot’s website spikes to tens of thousands of connections a second. These orders-of-magnitude spikes can overwhelm Woot’s datacenter.