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Spike Protection

Spike Protection is an additional service which can be activated in addition to your existing project subscription. It allows you to scale your project up to our maximum single-server capacity for a short period of time to allow you to deal with expected spikes in traffic, such as during marketing events.

Activating Spike Protection #

  1. Go to the Plan page in the Servd Dashboard

  2. Select a Start date and time for your protection period

  3. Select the number of hours that you'd would like the period to cover.

  4. Select the number of spike servers you'd like to use.

  5. Click "Schedule Spike Protection"

  6. Follow the instructions for any applicable payment

  7. At your scheduled start time, the platform will automatically scale up your project

Server Specifications #

During spike protection periods your project will be moved to a private server pool, where each server has:

  • 32 CPUs
  • 64GB RAM

And all of the services powering your project will be reconfigured to make appropriate use of these resources.

Choosing a Start and End Time #

At the very start and end of a spike protection period your project will experience between 30 and 60 seconds of service interruption. This is caused by the time taken to move and reconfigure the database. We therefore strongly advise that spike protection periods are scheduled to begin at periods of low traffic for your project, such as very early morning. You can choose a length of time that fits your use-case, with a minimum period of 3 hours.

You can make changes to the start time of a scaling period right up until the point where that period becomes active. This allows you to purchase scaling periods for use in the future and then reschedule them as required, or delay a period if your expected high-traffic period changes for any reason.

Server Resource Use #

When a spike protection period begins, any forced balancing of the maximum CPU usage of your project's components are removed - allowing them to arbitrarily access any available resources on the new private servers. Consequently, the insights graphs within the Servd dashboard will change to show the overall server usage rather than the normal, per-component resource use.

Pricing #

Spike protection is billed at a flat rate per hour, per server. The costs differ depending on your Servd Team's payment currency. The current costs per hour, per server are as follows:

  • £10, including VAT (GBP)
  • €9.50 (EUR)
  • $10.50 (USD)

Payment is taken up-front upon initial scheduling of a spike protection period.