iWeb Communities: Blog

The Facebook infrastructure team posted late last week that they were setting up 20% more photo servers and 50% more upload servers for Halloween, which is equivalent to 40TB of extra storage. The decision and the number of servers setup for the special event was deduced from past user activity statistics as well as user trends.

For practically every website, there are many special events like this which create a peak in traffic and website usage. The Wall Street Journal and many finance blogs experienced this for the banking crisis. Tomorrow, for election day in the US, most media news websites, candidates’s websites, and politics forums will experience a traffic peak, as many Internet users will want to check election coverage and also get early results for the 2008 US elections.

If you have a website, you should make a list of those potential events:

• Launch of a product or services on your website. New visitors will come on due day to check out the new product,
• Special industry events related to your website. It can be for example an upcoming conference, a popular sports event, elections. It can also be cyclical events such as Boxing Day or New Year’s Eve.
• Planned promotion campaigns, due to advertising or viral marketing, or mention from a big news website,
• If you manage a news website, you can experience a traffic peak thanks to the coverage of a current popular event.

It’s crucial to plan for extra-capacity, and make sure that new users will get a responsive website. These users could be your next customers or your future audience for the next months to come, and you should view it as an opportunity to showcase your website’s features.

Depending on the event, you now want to estimate the extra traffic you will get on the due date. Is it 30% more? 100%? 500%? A statistics tool like Google Analytics or Mint can help you dig in the numbers and see what kind of traffic you received in the past. If you estimate that you’ll get at most 30% or 50% more traffic, here are a few ideas:

• Look into your website software and see if you can cache pages, or if you can use a caching plugin. Wordpress has the WP-Cache plugin, Drupal has many modules avalaible to handle the caching system, Joomla! has a built-in cache system, Ruby On Rails can do page caching as well as page fragment caching etc.
• Consider displaying cached pages to all new visitors, and disable generation of dynamic pages,
• Look also into your web server and see if you can enable caching. Apache has mod_cache, and caching can also be activated in a IIS server. Web servers can also interact well with proxies,
• Try to see if it’s possible to disable one or two sections of the website which require heavy computing. You will free much-needed resources, which will be used to serve the new visitors
• In the same way, try to see it it’s possible to disable temporary services. Look into your cPanel or Plesk panel. Are there websites you don’t manage anymore? Is it possible to disable FTP or other services during the traffic peak?

Those measures are most of the time enough to handle a bump in your website’s traffic. However, if you estimate that your traffic will triple or more for these special events, you should think about upgrading your server. If you have a shared hosting, have a look at the budget dedicated servers. If you already have one, think about getting a Power server. Upgrades or new dedicated servers can take 24 hours to setup at iWeb, depending on your hardware and software choice, but in the case you are short-handed, there is a special line of dedicated servers which can be activated under one hour.

Of course, those are general advice that you should adapt to your case, but the tips above will definitely help you prepare for success. Of course, they also don’t protect you against unplanned & instantenous traffic peaks such as being on the frontpage websites like digg or or Yahoo! Buzz, which should be covered in a later post.