Hello, I'm sure more people got the same problem (hosting crashed when more people visit at once time or over load CPU...etc) when your website is growing and getting more traffic.
Can you give me any tips how to prevent web hosting crash on high traffic websites for Shared Servers and VPS hosting?
2 questions more:
How do you estimate traffic and choose a suitable hosting plan for it?
How do you scale it up for high traffic and then scale it down when low traffic and keep it cost effective for our budget?
Hi Margarita,
It's a very good question that you have asked and there are infact a variety of solutions for you.
1) I understand that a Dedicated Server is not financially viable for you at this time however this would likely be the best solution if you are expecting a large amount of traffic. Do remember that downtime costs money (in terms of SEO and lost advertising, sales, marketing, etc). Some of our existing clients migration from both Shared Hosting and VPS on to Dedicated Servers for a few months if they know that are expecting a large amount of traffic. They can then migrate back down if their traffic levels die down.
2) Using a VPS is extremely risky because there is a hard limit to the amount of traffic that ic can handle. This limit is usually the RAM although it can also be the CPU. For an average WordPress site we would normally estimate that each concurrent (simultaneous) connection to the server/site will use approximately 50 - 100mb or RAM. This means that is you have 20 people sat on your site and only 2GB of RAM in your VPS, the 21st person to logon could crash the site, if not certainly slow it down dramatically. This are just rough figures/estimates and it isn't as simple as this but the principle is the same.
3) If your hosting provider has a true Cloud Cluster Platform with Redundant Firewalls, Load-Balancers, etc. this platform should be able to cope with traffic spikes well however there is no guarantee that it will be able to do this as another site on the same Cluster as you may also be receiving a large amount of traffic and therefore requesting a a lot of resources at the same time. With Shared Hosting you will never know and so there is no guarantee that the site will stay up.
Making use of a CDN such as CloudFlare can help with reducing the server load during periods of high traffic and there are some free packages that are offered however this is essentially a caching tool and so only static content/images will be cached.
I hope this helps!
