Managing traffic spikes is essential to the success of your business. One day your web site is tottering along with its regular handful of traffic and the next day the traffic volumes are through the roof. It sounds ideal, but it could also destroy your website.
What causes traffic spikes?
A visitors spike can be caused by a few changes. It can be that you have been actively marketing your web site and the advertising has merely kicked in big style. If you are paying for this extra traffic then you need to be able to use it. But there are also other causes, let’s say a blog that has suddenly been featured on digg or other services and stacks of people taking an interest, or the sudden success of a search engine optimisation campaign. For these you might not know in advance they are going to occur.
What are the problems?
A huge increase in traffic could easily put you outside of your website’s allowable bandwidth. Although you are unlimited, the strain on the server of thousands of extra hits might slow it down or grind it to a complete halt. Orders might suddenly start flowing in faster than you might handle them and enquiries might be coming in by the dozen.
What could you do?
If it is not a planned spike, then it is very difficult to prepare for. But taking several precautions for instance using a reliable host, probably one that might expand quickly, is a good idea. Make sure that that databases are well optimised and in set ups as for instance WordPress, your tables are not full of post revisions, which can slow the database access down.
If you have a planned campaign of advertising then it might be worth speaking to your host around load sharing, where your web site is split more than multiple servers, or cloud hosting, where your hosting could expand as required. However, these do both cost more cash so you need to be confident. However, if the spike comes and you are not ready, your web site may only be unresponsive and that could mean the advertising is wasted.
Other visitors spikes
Traffic spikes could also be a sign of a problem. It can be that your website has been hacked and the hacker is sending people to a phishing page on your web site, or the hacker has optimised a page for an adult term and you are geting loads of visitors there. In both of these cases your server logs will identify the spike and the pages in question and you need to close down the hacker’s access and remove the offending pages from the site.
If you want to know more about finding website visitors, call over to our website to learn more about targeted web traffic. There you will find load more ideas or you can read more about how to get more web traffic if you prefer to do it yourself!
Written by Keith Lunt
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