A new AdWords campaign, a cover on Wiggle Me, a post shared by thousands of people on Facebook, the launch of a new product… any event that causes an increase in web traffic can cause the servers to stop working and the website crashes But why exactly does this happen?
- Because you are using a shared hosting. Your website may not have any problem, but your “neighbor’s” does. In a shared hosting you are sharing the capacity of the server with the rest of the hosted clients, so their behavior will affect you.
- Because the provider fails . Sometimes, simply, the provider is not prepared to handle the demands or the amount of traffic of a certain website. If you’re having ongoing crash issues and trying other solutions don’t improve, it’s time to consider switching providers.
- Because the resources are overloaded by technical problems , such as development failures, poorly optimized applications or oversights.
- Because there is a hardware failure . As the Americans say, “shit happens”: a disk has broken, the power supply has failed…
- Because there is a security flaw . Web security is a weak point for many companies, which makes them vulnerable to all kinds of cyberattacks. Sometimes it even happens that people outside the company have access to the servers without the company knowing anything.
How to handle an increase in web traffic without dying trying
If you know why websites crash, you are one step closer to preventing it. Before launching your next high-traffic campaign, keep these 4 points in mind to avoid scares.
1) Choose a web hosting plan that suits your needs.
Beware of bargains: a cheap plan with shared servers may give you “unlimited” resources, but in practice this is often not the case. It is necessary to have a forecast of the traffic that you are going to receive and choose the most appropriate option for your needs, not necessarily the cheapest.
2) Optimize your website so that it consumes fewer resources.
The problem can be attacked from two complementary TR Numbers fronts: either you hire more resources, or you manage to consume less without giving up web traffic (or both). As? Making your website spend less server resources.
To optimize this point, the ideal is to consult an expert, but here are some suggestions to get you started:
