When Kim Kardashian and Paper magazine set out to break the internet, it was the task of one engineer to make sure that Paper’s backend systems wouldn’t crumble under the weight of Kim’s backend.

Hosting that butt is an impressive feat. You can’t just put Kim Kardashian nudes on the Internet and walk away —that would be like putting up a tent in the middle of a hurricane. Your web server would melt. You need to plan.

And the understatement of the year:

“We may get a lot of traffic.”

Rather interesting read how to scale a system with mostly static content, but that will get hammered by millions within a few hours.