Case Study: BuiltLean achieves Reddit-ready scalability and faster, more reliable site performance with Rackspace Technology

How BuiltLean Survived The Front Page of Reddit, and The Traffic That Followed

BuiltLean, a fitness and training site, unexpectedly hit the front page of Reddit and saw a massive, rapid traffic surge — about 125,000 visitors with 60,000 arriving between noon and 2 p.m. Although their CMS was optimized (minified assets, caching, CDN), they lacked an HTTP accelerator and had an underpowered server setup, so the influx threatened site stability.

Rackspace support diagnosed the issue and within 20 minutes upgraded the database server and deployed a second server with a load balancer, absorbing the spike. For a long-term solution they added Varnish and a permanent, on-demand second server, plus ongoing WordPress tuning, which significantly improved page speed and server reliability for future traffic surges.

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