Upswings in traffic to your website is what every web owner dreams about. More traffic equates to greater conversions, better search engine rankings, and best of all, higher earnings!
Unfortunately, increased visitors can slow down your site if you are not adequately prepared for the sudden spike. This can crash your website and cause a loss of visitor trust forever. 40% of visitors abandon a site after just 3 seconds of load time. Each delayed second causes a 7% decrease in conversion rate; those higher earnings disappearing literally by the second.
There’s only so much concentrated traffic a server can take before it causes poor page load times or no page at all. I’ll hand it over to HostDime Marketing Manager Vikki Fraser, who experienced this exact situation 5 years ago when a boating etiquette article on her personal blog suddenly went viral.
I started using more memory and bandwidth than I had allotted for that domain and my page was not being served to my demanding fans. Adjustments to my domain package weren’t enough. I went over my allotted usage and my site was suspended! […] The hosting option I had chosen was not fit for the traffic I received. I had received hundreds of thousands of unique visitors in just a few hours. Once you breach what your package offers in terms of memory, you’re in danger of affecting others if you’re on a shared machine. So basically you get put in a corner to calm down.
Cloud to the Rescue
To ensure this never happens and your website never goes down, you need an infrastructure that’s elastic and always available. Enter the cloud, which consists of virtual machines spread across multiple physical servers. So if a server goes down, you are migrated seamlessly to a healthy server.
Now it’s time to choose how many resources your site requires. What makes HostDime’s cloud servers unique in our industry is the customization. Most cloud providers offer cookie cutter packages, while we allow you all the control in choosing your resources. Toggle and add CPUs, RAM, bandwidth, and storage to create your ideal cloud. Only pay for the server resources you choose.
Remember that it’s better to have too much than too little when it comes to bandwidth and server capabilities. If someone goes to your site and it’s down, not only are they less likely to come back, your competitors benefit from your lack of planning.
The Benefits of Autoscaling Cloud Servers
Say you are an online store who anticipates seasonal growth, or a store where you make your money at night, while demand is low the rest of the day. You can scale up or down your resources on the fly, no reboot required! Scaling CPU, RAM and disk space ensure you can handle whatever growth comes your way.
You can take it a step further and enable autoscaling.
With autoscaling, you choose how often your server checks how much RAM, CPU usage, and/or Disk usage you are consuming. You can set preferences to add resources if the usage hits a certain amount.
For instance, let’s say you set the time to check the server at 5 minutes, the usage percentage to 80%, and set a preference to add 1024 MB of RAM up to 4096 MB in 24 hours. When our system checks your virtual server and the amount of RAM used is above 80%, we’ll add 1 GB of RAM automatically. RAM will continue to be added in 1 GB increments every time your virtual server is over 80% RAM usage until a total of 4 GB of RAM is added to your virtual server in a 24-hour period. Our system will stop adding RAM until the next 24-hour period begins.
For an easy step by step guide to enable autoscaling on your HostDime cloud server, head to our Knowledge Base article.
Always Stay Online with a Cloud CDN
Lastly, to add another layer of protection against traffic, look into a cloud Content Delivery Network.
HostDime’s Cloud Accelerator leverages 20 data center locations around the global to provide an instant free CDN for web content hosted in our cloud infrastructure, speeding up your entire Virtual Server. Here’s how that helps against traffic spikes:
- REDUCED LATENCY: The closer you are to your end user, the quicker your page will load.
- HIGHER AVAILABILITY: If one location becomes unavailable, another location serves the content.
- GREATER SCALABILITY: With your content distributed worldwide, your applications can handle higher traffic.
Best of all, this is a FREE add-on from us to enjoy on your HostDime cloud server.
For any questions you have regarding our cloud infrastructure or autoscaling in general, don’t hesitate to hit us up on chat.
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Jared Smith is HostDime’s Content and SEO Strategist.