WebHostRight

If you actively promote your websites and you know how to really get your website out there and in front of people who are looking for what you provide, then you might get traffic spikes from time to time.

A traffic spike is when the amount of traffic through to your site goes up significantly over the space of a day, a few days or maybe even longer.

This may happen because you recently posted a fantastic article on your blog or released some information that creates a bit of a wave in the community that you are involved in online or you may have released a free application that thousands of people are after and floods of traffic comes through to your website in a short space of time.

When this happens though, will your web hosting provider be able to cope with it, and are they ok with it? You think they will be right? I mean you’re paying them for bandwidth and storage space and the other features that come with your account, but in reality this surge of traffic may put a heavy demand on the server where you website is that is suddenly getting heavy traffic.

On a dedicated server this may not be as much of an issue but on shared web hosting this may cause a few problems as you are sharing server resources with other customers of the provider on that particular server, and because server resources are limited it means that a traffic spike that lasts throughout the day or a few days may put too much strain on the server, your website will be seen as hogging the server resources and will possibly get your account suspended, if not that then your website may suffer downtime because of the extra traffic and this leads to a lot of that extra traffic being wasted on visitors that try and reach your site only to find that it’s down, this leads to frustration all round, for you, the visitors and your web hosting provider.

This is also one of those times when you discover that they cant provide unlimited everything to you, your website cant hammer the server resources because it affects the rest of the sites and customers sharing that server with you.

A traffic spike for one site may be quite different for another, where one site may see a few thousand extra visits over a few days that they dont normally get, another website may see a million extra visits or more that they dont usually receive, both are still traffic spikes, but it’s the ability of the server resources allocated to your account to be able to cope for the duration of that traffic spike that is most important.

Of course you dont know how successful a new addition to or about your site will be, sometimes it can be expected, other times you put some new information out there about your website and unexpectedly you get a massive response.

Until this happens you dont know for sure how your web hosting provider and your account will cope with the traffic, it will make a difference the type of hosting that you are using, but even on vps or dedicated hosting theres still a chance of downtime or other problems if the traffic spike is big enough and lasts for a few days.