How to Handle Traffic Spikes On a Shared Server Hosting

You wake up one day, check out your website’s statistics, and suddenly, a content piece goes viral and attracts thousands of visitors overnight.

This excitement might become a nightmare if your website needs to prepare for it. According to research, if a website cannot handle traffic spikes, visitors leave it within 8 seconds. Your website’s issue can hurt your credibility, which could be better for business.

You may use practical strategies to deal with such traffic spikes. In this article, we will explore them.

What are Traffic Spikes?

A traffic spike means an abnormal and sudden rise in your website visitors. You might get a viral post, a recently successful marketing campaign, or an unexpected recommendation from some trusted site. While spiking in traffic is good for business, it brings some trouble to you if your website runs on a shared server.

We understand that shared servers divide websites’ CPU, RAM, bandwidth, and other resources. When traffic goes up, your website needs more resources to load. Your website will then start showing errors to visitors or even crash. Being prepared for such an incident helps keep your website running constantly.

Signs That Your Site is Experiencing a Traffic Spike

• Slow Loading Times

  A common sign of a traffic spike is slower website loading times. As server resources, such as CPU, RAM, etc., get stretched to handle increased traffic, pages may take more time to load, thereby frustrating users and causing them to abandon your site.

• Server Timeout Errors

  Server timeout errors arise when the server takes too long to respond to a user’s request and, therefore, times out. During traffic spikes, the server may struggle to handle the high volume of incoming requests, resulting in delays in processing and responding.

• Monitoring Alerts:

  Many web hosting services, like AccuWeb Hosting, provide monitoring tools that alert you when traffic increases unusually, allowing you to take immediate action to prevent downtime.

• High Bounce Rates:

  Observing a high bounce rate during this period may suggest that the traffic comes from non-genuine users, possibly due to spam or bot activity.

• Increased Direct Traffic:

  A spike in direct traffic, especially from unfamiliar sources or regions, can signal a successful marketing effort or potential spam.

How to Handle Traffic Spikes on a Shared Server?

Improving your website’s performance is key to handling traffic spikes effectively. By optimizing your site, you reduce the strain on your server, allowing it to handle more visitors without affecting its performance.

• Use SSD Storage

  The type of storage in your hosting plan can impact performance during high traffic. Hosting with mechanical hard drives (HDDs) is slower than with solid-state drives (SSDs). While HDDs are cheaper and common in shared hosting plans, they can cause slowdowns when traffic spikes.

• Reduce HTTP Requests

  Each visitor to your website triggers several HTTP requests from his browser to load elements like images, stylesheets, and scripts.

  Reducing HTTP requests can enhance loading speeds. This can be done by combining files (like CSS and JavaScript), eliminating unnecessary plugins, and minimizing the number of elements on each page.

• Set Up Caching Solutions

  Caching can significantly lighten the load on your server by storing copies of your website’s pages and delivering them to visitors without processing a full request each time. Implementing server-side and client-side caching, especially on shared servers, can significantly improve your site’s performance during traffic spikes.

Server-Side Caching

Server-side caching saves the latest version of your website directly on the server. When a visitor accesses a page, the cached version is delivered, reducing the need to process the request from the beginning. This approach enhances site speed and minimizes server load during busy traffic times.

Client-Side Caching (Browser Caching)

Client-side or browser caching stores parts of your website on the visitor’s device. This decreases the requests sent to your server during traffic surges, enabling the server to prioritize new visitors. When set up correctly, client-side caching can significantly improve your site’s capacity to manage high traffic.

• Use Content Delivery Network (CDN)

  A Content Delivery Network (CDN) consists of a global server network. Your website’s static content (images, CSS, and JavaScript files) is cached across these servers using a CDN. This enables visitors to retrieve content from a server nearest to them, lowering latency and reducing the load on your primary server.

Tip: CDNs can also help during traffic spikes by spreading the load across several servers, ensuring no single server gets overwhelmed.

• Optimizing Traffic Management with Load Balancing

  Load balancing evenly distributes incoming network traffic across multiple servers. This technique prevents any single server from becoming overburdened, ensuring consistent and reliable performance, even during periods of high traffic. Balancing the load helps ensure websites and applications run well.

• Optimizing Database Queries

  If your website uses a database, slow queries can slow your site down during traffic spikes. Optimizing these queries helps lighten the load on your server, keeping your site fast and responsive.

• Optimize Server Configurations

  Opt for web servers like LiteSpeed, known for its lightweight architecture and ability to handle high traffic volumes efficiently. Many shared hosting providers, such as AccuWeb Hosting, already use LiteSpeed for better performance.

• Upgrade to a Scalable Plan

  If you are on shared hosting and experiencing regular traffic spikes, upgrading to a higher-tier shared hosting plan may give you access to additional resources like CPU, RAM, and bandwidth. This allows your site to handle more visitors without performance degradation.

How Accuweb Hosting Can Help?

Handling peak traffic using shared hosting can be tricky, but with AccuWeb Hosting, you can handle surges in visitors without compromising performance. Our shared hosting solutions ensure your website remains stable during high-traffic periods.

• Guaranteed Resources – No Overselling

  One of AccuWeb Hosting’s main features is its guaranteed resource commitment. Unlike many other shared hosting services, which oversell server capacity, AccuWeb Hosting guarantees customers a dedicated share of a server’s bandwidth and CPU power. This is especially helpful for websites that experience sudden traffic increases.

• Upgradable Hosting Options

  Flexible, upgradable hosting plans for easy scaling with growing traffic demands. If you are experiencing consistent spikes of visitors, you can easily upgrade your hosting plan to a more robust one to keep your site fast and reliable. This scalability means you don’t need to lose sleep over outgrowing your shared hosting – just move on to a more advanced solution as required for your projects without disrupting service.

• Content Delivery Network (CDN) Integration

  AccuWeb Hosting integrates with Content Delivery Networks to optimize performance. Your site’s static content is cached across global servers, reducing latency and speeding up the loading speed by fetching content from the nearest server. CDNs also help to balance the load during peak traffic periods and lighten the burden on your shared server.

Tip: Choose a CDN with a wide network of edge locations to ensure fast delivery to your audience.

• Managed Web Hosting

  AccuWeb Hosting offers Managed Web Hosting services to relieve the technical burden on your shoulders. Our team will monitor, maintain, and optimize servers and ensure your site is up-to-date and performing. In the case of traffic spikes, managed services can easily detect such spikes, resulting in reduced downtime and maximized reliability.

Conclusion

Running a website can sometimes bring sudden increased traffic, which could be exciting or stressful, depending on how prepared you are to handle it. It is always possible to prepare against problems after waiting for the spike to occur.

With the right hosting plan, proper security measures, and a well-optimized website, you should be ready to manage any surge.

Your hosting provider determines your readiness for preparing for web traffic spikes. Choosing a hosting provider such as AccuWeb Hosting, which can handle many tasks, will give you peace of mind.