{"id":3117,"date":"2019-04-01T13:14:35","date_gmt":"2019-04-01T12:14:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.20i.com\/blog\/?p=3117"},"modified":"2026-04-08T10:34:11","modified_gmt":"2026-04-08T09:34:11","slug":"dragons-den-effect","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.20i.com\/blog\/dragons-den-effect\/","title":{"rendered":"The Dragons’ Den Effect"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For those unfamiliar with it, BBC\u2019s \u2018Dragons\u2019 Den\u2019 is a TV show that\u2019s been running since 2005.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Entrepreneurs pitch business ideas to wealthy investors who are known as \u2018Dragons\u2019. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Photo
(BBC Studios\/Simon Pantling)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

If the Dragons like the idea, they will offer to invest an amount of money in the company, usually in return for a share in that company.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What has that got to do with web hosting?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

It means small, relatively-unknown companies suddenly get a national platform. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A website that might get 50 visitors a day suddenly gets hundreds of thousands. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those visitors arrive all at once!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Traditional web hosting can’t cope<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

That spells problems for a last-generation shared hosting – like cPanel-based platforms which have to use software limited to a single server. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The busy site will make huge demands on the resources of that one server: processing, RAM, storage and network bandwidth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This will lead to other sites having less of a share of resources, slowing down server responses and increasing loading times. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Slower loading sites mean less engaged users and declining search engine rankings<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Too much traffic = downtime<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The site(s) could also go down completely: commonly known as a server crash. This is when users can\u2019t view a website in their browser because some or all of their requests are being refused. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most shared hosting companies ask customers to warn them if you know that you\u2019re about to have a spike in traffic, so they can prepare their server and allocate extra resources to the site.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We don\u2019t ask you to do that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our confidence was put to the test when one of our customers appeared on Dragons\u2019 Den in August 2017.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The successful pitch<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

On a Sunday in August 2017 one of our direct hosting customers appeared on the programme.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They were successful: they received an investment which helped kick-start their business. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

They\u2019re still doing well now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The audience of 3 million was interested in them too: visitors flooded their site. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What could have happened<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In a less robust shared server configuration, the spike in traffic would have caused problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those visiting the site would be inconvenienced: the site may be slow, or they may not be able to see it all (503 error).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"An<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The server would also be forced to reallocate resources from all the other sites on that single server, leading to a slow-down for them. It could even result in downtime on those sites, inconveniencing even more people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even if they were with a traditional hosting company that had multiple data centres, this wouldn\u2019t have helped. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That’s because traditional load balancing technology only works on a single server<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Single-server load balancing is fine for its purpose: to prevent failed hardware causing website downtime. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it wouldn’t have helped in this situation, as one server wasn’t enough to handle the traffic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So it would have not only hurt their business, but also all the other businesses\/sites hosted on that server.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What happened with the 20i platform<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The Dragons\u2019 Den entrant\u2019s site continued to work as normal. As did all the other sites on 20i\u2019s shared hosting platform<\/a>. No one had their Sunday evening chill-time interrupted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The difference with 20i comes from our autoscaling technology, which we created in-house (and don\u2019t share with anyone else).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What happens is that a traffic monitor will detect an upsurge in traffic and respond immediately: moving the site to its own dedicated \u2018Dragons’ Den\u2019 groups of servers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There, the site is allocated as much resource as needed: raw hardware with no other shared neighbours. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Multiple redundant 40-core machines are available to take up the slack. Once the Dragons\u2019 Den Effect is over, your site is moved back to the normal infrastructure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"The<\/a>
The Dragons’ Den Effect (click to expand) <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

This wouldn\u2019t be possible for a site that was confined to a single server, like you are forced to use with old software like cPanel or Plesk. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our autoscaling tech is available across our Web Hosting<\/a> and Reseller Hosting<\/a> packages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, there you have it: that\u2019s how the Dragons\u2019 Den Effect<\/em> term came about at 20i.
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For those unfamiliar with it, BBC\u2019s \u2018Dragons\u2019 Den\u2019 is a TV show that\u2019s been running since 2005. Entrepreneurs…","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17173,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"ub_ctt_via":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"csco_singular_sidebar":"","csco_page_header_type":"","csco_page_load_nextpost":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[46,51,47],"tags":[81,70],"class_list":["post-3117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-20i","category-technology","category-web-hosting","tag-internet","tag-web-hosting","cs-entry"],"featured_image_src":"https:\/\/www.20i.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Dragons-Den-Effect-NT.png","author_info":{"display_name":"Richard Chambers","author_link":"https:\/\/www.20i.com\/blog\/author\/richardchambers\/"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.20i.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.20i.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.20i.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.20i.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.20i.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3117"}],"version-history":[{"count":66,"href":"https:\/\/www.20i.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3117\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19110,"href":"https:\/\/www.20i.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3117\/revisions\/19110"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.20i.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.20i.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.20i.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.20i.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}