How PAPER Magazine’s web engineers scaled Kim Kardashian’s back-end

First things first, that’s a pretty good double-entendre headline (all credit to the author, Paul Ford).

This is the story of the planning required to host a web site that you know is about to get melted by traffic.

There was one part of the Internet that PAPER didn’t want to break: The part that was serving up millions of copies of Kardashian’s nudes over the web.

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.

Read on for the technical details that made this all possible.