Is Your Website Ready for Sudden Traffic Spikes?

For most of the business owners, a surge in their website traffic is a good news because it will likely generate more leads and may eventually convert them into sales. However, sometimes a sudden traffic surge can become a threat to site functionality and it can do more harm than good. Occasionally, when a website goes viral, it may drive tons of web traffic exceeding the maximum server resources allocated for the website. When it happens, the load on the server increases and the site will go offline not responding to the user requests. No matter how well the site is optimized for better speed, if the server is overloaded with burst of requests, the response will be slow making the site inefficient for user interaction. This will also have an adverse affect on customer retention and business revenues.

As a business owner, if you want to take the advantage of incoming traffic then it is essential to keep the site prepared for such critical situations. 

Monitor Site Traffic Capability

Before you consider upgrading to better hosting plans, you need to understand the site traffic capability. This can be done with the help of a quality website monitoring service, which helps to decide whether the existing hosting service is enough to cope with the situations of website traffic spikes. It helps to analyze how the site is working against user demands and what resources are required to address the challenges of high site volume. In addition, the monitoring service will promptly send alerts when the site traffic is about to exceed the capacity limits and when there is a need for expanding the site server resources. Based on the data given by the website monitor, you can work on other aspects to make the site resilient for traffic spikes.

Keep The Server Resources Scalable

By knowing the current site traffic status using monitoring service, you can plan for scaling up the hosting resources to better suit your site requirements. The current bandwidth & storage space provided by the hosting service might be enough to handle the daily traffic loads but may not be sufficient to accommodate higher traffic spikes. Hence it is wise to have a hosting solution with flexible plan which can scale up or down as needed by the website. This will allow the site to have scaled up resources when traffic spike is expected and go back to normal resources when the traffic is subsided. 

Provide Content via Content Delivery Networks

It is one way of reducing load on servers during traffic surges and improve the website access speed for the visitors coming from different locations. The CDNs cache the content and make it available to the users from the servers closest to them. This helps reduce the repeated HTTP requests and balances the load on the web servers because the page resources are coming from the cache but not from the website server.

Use Hosting That Offers Load Balancing Web Servers

When the servers get overloaded by the excess traffic, the server performance suffers or sometimes they stop responding to the requests. One efficient way to manage the traffic spikes without crashing the website is to use a hosting service that has load balancing web servers. Here the incoming network traffic gets distributed across multiple web servers, reducing the burden on a single server. Load balancing evenly spreads the traffic requests and eventually increases server performance during times of high activity. This way it keeps the website up through traffic spikes and makes the site more reliable.