I don't have data to back me up other than an anecdotal 'I seem to notice', but doesn't reddit often become unusable during exceptional usage spikes? the Obama

I don't have data to back me up other than an anecdotal 'I seem to notice', but doesn't reddit often become unusable during exceptional usage spikes? the Obama AMA comes to mind. if you look at their numbers[1] for 2012, it's plausible that they are simply overwhelmed during these bursts and they've judged it worthwhile to let these aberrations play out. for many operations.. moving your availability from, say, 99.9% to 99.99% is simply not worth the cost. uptime is hard; GitHub has only maintained 99.96% for the past month[2][3] (and, IMO, they're actively trying to improve it) [1]: http://blog.reddit.com/2012/12/top-posts-of-year-and-best-of-2012.html http://blog.reddit.com/2012/12/top-posts-of-year-and-best-of... [2]: https://status.github.com/graphs/past_month https://status.github.com/graphs/past_month [3]: http://cl.ly/image/0O2S0L3O0l3J http://cl.ly/image/0O2S0L3O0l3J edit: clean up links edit2: learning \n