The blitz of web traffic following news of Michael Jackson’s unexpected death greatly underscores a core value proposition of cloud computing: If your site gets a major surge in traffic, you can spin up new servers to handle it. Given the relatively low monthly prices and ease-of-use of cloud offerings designed to handle web-site traffic (e.g., Mosso), and the pay-by-the-drink billing offered by other providers (e.g., Amazon Web Services), there are few excuses for long-term downtime. And considering nobody reads the newspaper anymore, shouldn’t news sites expect heavy traffic and know enough to plan accordingly?