Is There Any "Pay As You Use On Additional Servers + Bandwidth" Providers

This is my 1st post on this forum and my sole reason is to gain some valuable advice from members of this great community to my hosting predicament below.

We are currently developing an e-commerce website that has similar business model as woot.com. I believe you have heard of this website before as it is very popular in the U.S. Their business model is to sell 1 item a day and the sale will end prematurely if the quantity of the product is sold off before the day ends.

What I would like to bring your attention is that woot.com has a special event called “WOOTOFF”, whereby instead of selling 1 item a day, they would have successive items for sale JUST FOR THE DAY. On this special “WOOTOFF” occasion, there would be A HUGE TRAFFIC SPIKE FOR THE DAY as compared to their regular days. Traffic could increase 10 FOLD or more for this “WOOTOFF” event when compared to their regular daily affair sales.

OUR WEBSITE

As a startup business similar to woot.com, we intend to start off with only 1 dedicated server to handle our entire frontend, backend, and database web operation and to handle REGULAR traffic flow on normal day sales, in which we would expect around less than 5K CONCURRENT active users to visit our website on a daily basis for the first few months. There would also be a blog and forum as well on our site.

Since we will be having such similar “WOOTOFF” event (probably once every 2 – 3 months), the traffic will definitely increase multiple folds for that 24 hours and our 1 unit server definitely will not be able to cope with the increased traffic load. Also, it is not economical to just go out and rent extra dedicated servers to handle that spike of traffic load (in that 24 hours) whereby we will have pay for the extra servers based on the entire month’s fee. This means out of the 30 days in a month, the additional rented servers’ and bandwidth resource are only fully utilized for that 1 day while the remaining 29 days are sitting there idle.

Just to illustrate my point. Let say to handle our normal traffic flow, we have 2 present servers in place. When we run the “WOOTOFF” event and if we were to expect a 10 fold hike in traffic, then the additional number of servers we need to add is 10 x 2 = 20 additional servers. If each server rental costs like US$400.00 per month, we are looking at paying US$8,000 just for the rental of the 20 additional servers in a month, but are only used for ONE day to handle the traffic and bandwidth spike while the remaining days are left idle. This method and the associated cost involved to handle that 1 day traffic spike is not acceptable for us at all.

I HOPE YOU GUYS CAN SOLVE THE QUESTIONS I HAVE BELOW BASED ON THE ABOVE “WOOTOFF” SCENARIO.

1. Is there any dedicated server provider that allows for customers to only pay for the additional servers and bandwidth resources just to handle the additional traffic spike for that day’s usage?

2. I understand that there is a method to pay as you use method by utilizing Amazon S3 or CDN network but I’m completely clueless about how to go about this.

3. To your knowledge, what would be the most cost effective solution and how you’d go about it if you were in a shoestring budget whereby you’d only want to pay for the additional servers and bandwidth just for the day’s usage?

HERE IS A QUESTION FOR YOU BASED ON NORMAL SERVER UPGRADE OR ADDITIONS BASED ON STEADY INCREASE OF NORMAL TRAFFIC.

In the near future, if our website is recording a steady increase of NORMAL traffic and our primary 1st server cannot handle the increased traffic, of course we would have to add more dedicated servers whereby the newly added servers will be a permanent fixture paid on a monthly basis to take care of the steady increase of NORMAL traffic.

4. What would be your advice to me to load balance the traffic who insist on the most convenient, optimal and economical load balance solution to handle the steady increase of NORMAL traffic flow? E.g. server clustering, server mirrors, round robin DNS, etc as opposed to renting a load balancing router hardware from server providers that could cost like US$500+ monthly (rental + each server setup) whether it is being used or not.