Wow - this wasn't meant to be happening just yet!
Someone, somewhere out there, learned about carfax and before we knew what was happening the server was overloaded and the site was down. We went from a few friends and family testing for us to serving up one page view every second at peak times. Our little server was unable to cope and needed to be restarted every ten to fifteen minutes. Fortunately for me Anton was on system admin duty and had the job of keeping the server up and running all Monday night.
Monit to the rescue! A great little application that monitors server status and is able to restart misbehaving/overloaded services before they shut down the whole server.
We have since doubled the memory and cpu on the server and it is now coping with the increased load. You'll be pleased to know that Anton is sleeping better now.
Geoff