In December 2007, the team at Eckhart Teachings presented us with an interesting challenge. Eckhart Tolle was presenting his latest work, A New Earth, on the Oprah show. Oprah was not only featuring his book, but was working with Eckhart to create a series of online seminars to help her audience learn how to use the book in everyday life.

Although we’ve been providing Eckhart Teachings with web development and hosting for almost five years, this was a big step for both our team and theirs. We wanted to ensure that Eckhart could take advantage of this amazing opportunity to connect with a new audience for A New Earth, with zero downtime.

We took a few vital steps to make sure that Eckhart’s sites were running smoothly throughout these Oprah events.

First, we moved parts of Eckhart’s site into a semantic database. This allowed us to build faster connections between pieces of information. We relocated the site onto the Amazon S3 Cloud, so that it could grow dynamically throughout the Oprah promotion. And finally, we monitored the site manually for the first 24 hours after the Oprah launch to make sure that everything was running smoothly.

The result: Oprah.com went down while EckartTolle.com stayed live, even with upwards of a million hits per hour. With a little planning and creativity, we achieved zero downtime.

We’re now in the process of moving all of Eckhart’s web materials into our semantic framework and introducing a user centre.  Stay tuned as we rebuild the site piece by piece!

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