Thirty seconds. That’s how long it took for football fans to crash the NFL.com website after the Pittsburgh Steelers won the right to head to Super Bowl XLV.

The NFL, which uses Rackspace to host its website, responded quickly to amp up servers overnight, but were still searching for bandwidth to accommodate the server-crashing traffic spikes into the next day.

Despite reports that the NFL had ramped up its bandwidth in anticipation of the traffic spikes that would come during the playoffs and Super Bowl, they still weren’t ready for the flood of visitors. It can happen to anyone, but it doesn’t have to. You can get affordable back up servers in place that offer you the bandwidth you need even during traffic spikes.

Indeed, with our Pronto family we offer multiple solutions to avoid the NFL’s fate. ServerPronto, the world’s most reliable dedicated server, has redundancies in place that help our customers avoid server outages, including fault tolerant network devices that link data centers to upstream providers and multiple Tier 1 backbones connected via dynamic routing protocols.

And CloudPronto‘s cloud servers bring the power and high availability of the cloud to the dedicated server model. Just like a dedicated server, cloud servers offer total access to run applications and host websites on a fault tolerant platform. Our cloud servers at CloudPronto allow organizations to quickly provision, deploy and take down virtualized server instances as demands on the server change.

You don’t have to be NFL.com during the playoffs to see your traffic spike — and you don’t have to be a major sports organization to have backups systems in place that accommodate those traffic spikes. Our dedicated servers and cloud servers are not only reliable — they are affordable. You can use our servers as a backup without breaking your IT budget.