It’s the nightmare scenario for any blogger. All the hours and effort you’ve
invested in writing, promoting and developing your site, only for it to go down
as soon as you hit the jackpot.
An article that goes viral, a retweet from a high-profile influencer or a
link from a top-tier website: it’s what you’ve been working towards, but is
your blog ready to cope with the resulting traffic?
If you’re yet to find out the hard way, your web hosting and server setup
can play a hugely important role in making your blog a success.
Pieces of content – in the form of blog posts and social media output – are
often described in terms of being building blocks. Your hosting is the
foundations on which your content is built. Get that wrong and it all comes
tumbling down pretty quickly.
How important is it that your blog is available?
That is the first – and perhaps the most important – question to ask
yourself. It is something you need to repeatedly come back to when making
decisions about your hosting arrangements.
National broadcasters, popular tech websites and high-traffic niche blogs
are make up a huge portion of web hosting clients. Even within that relatively
close demographic, people have different budgets, hosting requirements and
answers to that all-important question.
In the ‘jackpot’ examples we mentioned, how much would it cost you – or
maybe pain you – for your website to crash? Act according to your answer when
weighing up which of these hosting tips for high-traffic blogs is right for
your website.
1. Choose the right hosting package
The most fundamental aspect of website hosting is getting the right sort of
package to begin with. As with anything in life, you tend to get what you pay
for so don’t expect an entry level package to serve enterprise ambition. Be
realistic and choose a package with enough CPU and RAM to give the raw power
your website needs.
As a rule of thumb, websites that attract flashes of traffic, like blogs,
are well-suited to private cloud hosting supported by a content delivery
network (CDN). This option gives the efficiency and scalability of the cloud,
but with extra control and security. The CDN takes the strain off the main
server by hosting photos and other static assets that might otherwise drain
your resources.
2. Pick something scalable
As alluded to in the previous point, the way to deal with surges of traffic
without breaking the bank is to opt for a hosting package that’s flexible
enough to scale-up when the crowds arrive and scale back down to something
that’s a bit more affordable when they’ve gone.
3. Use web server caching
A cache takes pages or assets within your blog and creates static versions
of them which load much more quickly. This can result in 20x better performance
from exactly the same server.
The impact on user experience is limited and the improvement in site speed
dramatic. We tend to use caching tools such as NGINX and Varnish. Any blog that
uses WordPress will benefit hugely from caching. In fact it’s a must for
maintaining decent performance levels.
4. Use servers close to your readers
Where is your traffic coming from? It is a good idea to have versions of
your website hosted in data centres close to your main geographic hot-spots.So,
if you’re big in Brazil, hot in Hungary or in-demand in India, move your
content closer to the audience. The result will be a better user experience and
a more efficient use of your resources.
5. Tune your database
A tidy database can go a long way towards stopping your website crashing
during busy periods. Slow queries, inefficient calls and multiple table joins –
all of which can occur naturally as your website evolves over time – can cause
slow performance on high-traffic websites
6. Use a database cache
Database queries are very often the cause of performance problems for high
traffic websites, even if you’ve tuned your database as outlined above. Using a
tool like Memcache or Redis will improve performance when large numbers of
visitors are concurrently dipping in and out of articles, photos and other
pieces of content.
7. Use lateral scaling and load balancing
Even the most powerful servers and their software have a ‘hard limit’ at
which point their resources hit a wall. You can circumvent this by using more
than one server and balancing the load across them.
This is the web hosting embodiment of the old adage, ‘a problem shared is a
problem halved’. It can achieve greater capacity and better performance while
retaining cost-effectiveness.
8. Pay attention to your network
This starts at home by making sure you’ve got the basics right. In the past
we’ve seen people tick the wrong box with usage limits or firewall settings and
inadvertently limit their server resources.
Further afield, your hosting company will be using internet exchanges as
part of their network. Check that there are no bottlenecks with their
infrastructure and that sufficient bandwidth is being made available to your
website.
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