How to Deal With a Sudden Increase in Traffic to Your Website

The success of any business today largely depends on its online visibility. With the right online marketing strategy and SEO efforts, such visibility can be phenomenal. And when it does, the website traffic grows exponentially, which, of course, is an excellent start for generating conversions. However, most site owners are not prepared to handle the sudden spike in site traffic, and it often leads to an overload on the server and sometimes, causes the site to face downtime or even crash. So how do you handle a sudden increase in traffic to your website?

Choose the right hosting service

The performance of a website is heavily dependent on its hosting environment. From the hosting platform to the service plan that you choose, will eventually determine the output that you can expect. When it comes to managing websites with very high traffic volumes like e-commerce, news publications, or movie sites, opting for a VPS in India is a smarter choice. With VPS or Virtual Private Server hosting, the hosting server is divided into smaller virtual servers, each of which is kept exclusive of the other. Every individual server has dedicated hardware and software resources. This allows the site data to get distributed, and you can access the root or customize your private server with additional resources or new applications as you need.

Backups

There is always a possibility of website data loss due to hacking or some other natural disaster that is out of anyone’s control. Therefore, it is vital that you take regular backups of the entire website. With VPS Hosting services, you can easily configure and automate daily backups either on a local device or a remote server. This helps you create a safety net for your data and applications.

Make provisions for resource scalability

With more traffic inflow to your site, you will need additional resources to support the same, so your website continues to perform without any issue. This is another aspect which your hosting provider can help you with. Ensure that your hosting platform has provisions for instant scalability of resources so you can get more storage, bandwidth, or updated applications as soon as your site has a massive traffic influx.

Use Caching

One of the most tried and tested ways of managing high volume traffic is to cache the site data. This helps store the information in a subdirectory or a proxy server and yields it to the user as soon as a request comes through the web. This reduces time lag and maintains site speed, thus sparing the traffic from overloading the main server.

Use a CDN

Another efficient way of managing high volume traffic is to distribute the site content across a Content Delivery Network. This also works for websites with high volume content and heavy data files. A CDN spreads the site data across multiple servers in different locations. So depending on the geographical location of the user, it yields data from the nearest server. This diverts the traffic across the globe and reduces the burden on the server and network as well.

On a parting note…

High traffic is great for your online business, but if it becomes unmanageable, then all your marketing and operational efforts go in vain. Hence always create provisions for such scenarios in advance and seek the apt hosting plan, so your site continues to grow and yield your revenue.