Dealing With Sudden Success on Your Website - Things to Plan for and Avoid

The dream of every website owner is having lots of traffic, but what if you were not prepared for a sudden influx of hundreds of thousands of users? That is precisely the problem that confronted our website and had we the proper planning in place we could of saved ourselves hundreds of dollars in lost advertising revenue. Our small hobby website turned into a portal where thousands of users visited each day and mistakes were made along the way.

When we first started our games website, there was little expectation we would have the massive amount of players today in such a short time.  Through some organic linking we quickly outgrew our initial setup in leaps and bounds. Our small online game grew from having 10 people at any given time, to 750 simultaneous users, to 1500 simultaneous users. Now translating that over the course of the day, our average user traffic went from 4000 hits to 100,000.

What I outline will hopefully prove beneficial to planning and avoiding some of our earlier mistakes of using inadequate web hosting.

Plan for success

If you build it, they will come. How they might find your website varies (Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon etc) but if you build unique content and put some effort into growing your links organically, you will have to ultimately deal with the avalanche of web traffic. If you are not a technically advanced webmaster, you should start off by visiting a popular webmaster forum such as Digitalpoint and learn as much as possible.

Due to the very nature of the internet, you can never fully know what to expect from one day to the next in terms of traffic while you are busy growing your website. Goals are helpful but you can't schedule the exact date when your websites popularity will soar. All it takes is one good quality link to increase your websites traffic tenfold.

Scalability of your Web Hosting

For the average personal website receiving only a few hundred visits over a day any web hosting provider will do. Keeping in mind if you want to grow your website make sure your web host will offer upgrade packages to your account so you can be ready to handle the increase of users. It is important to make sure those upgrade packages are not affected by any time constraints! Hostmonster for example offers an upgraded account but sometimes will wait up to two weeks to do so! Can you handle two weeks of downtime of your website just as its popularity is peaking?

Many of these low cost web providers advertise "unlimited bandwidth" but in reality, if they deem your website is slowing down their network, they simply disable your website with no warning! If you plan to grow your website, sometimes it is best to not fall for the easy lure of budget web hosting companies as they only are good when your traffic is minimal.

The ideal choice for your website is finding a web host that can scale with your websites growth. Grid hosting which is sometimes known as Cloud hosting, is a viable option for scalability. Our site eventually settled on an entire dedicated web hosting machine for our web site which we rent out for a monthly fee from PEER 1 and several servers that just host our game files or server file. We are very satisfied with the performance of PEER 1's hosting solution.

Help yourself: Optimize

This would involve keeping the size of your website fairly streamlined for even non-broadband internet users. Avoid having excessively large html graphics, using Adobe Photoshop Save for Web option is a huge bandwidth saver for example. Try your best to keep the balance between content quality and download size.

For example the games on our website consist of anywhere from 500k to 4 megs, 4 megs being the maximum file size we feel is acceptable when dealing with the amount of traffic our site receives. Now that might seem very small and limited but a file size of 4 megs being viewed by almost a million users works out to be many terabytes of data per month. Most web hosting will offer a flat rate of 2-4 terabytes of bandwidth per month and then charge you for any over usage. Make sure every file you have is absolutely necessary at that point.

Other tips to help you optimize your website if it is receiving a lot of user traffic could be not hosting all the files exclusive to your one web host but rather spread them across some relevant websites.

For example if you are starting a Photography website, consider placing your pictures on a free website service such as Picasa or Flickr to help spread the bandwidth burden. If you have a games website like Switchin.net, consider renting out a server to solely handle your most popular files.

Dedicated Hosting

If your site is fortunate enough to step up to the next level of web traffic where you are receiving a hundred thousand visitors a day; dedicated hosting is the way to go. Essentially what this is an entire computer is rented on a monthly basis from a hosting company. Only your websites traffic will go through this machine and your bandwidth is not shared with any other users. Many professional companies do this for their websites but if you are just starting out keep in mind this type of web hosting can range from 200-400 dollars a month depending on your requirements. There are numerous options available, so do your homework and shop around to what fits best your needs.

What to Avoid

If you don't pick your web hosting right you will be in the dreaded situation of having to transfer the name registrar from one provider to another. In our situation we had to transfer from Hostmonster to our dedicated hosting machine. This is a fairly slow process (anywhere from 3-7 business days) which can feel like an eternity. Hopefully with enough planning you can avoid this dreaded step but it might be inevitable if your site exceeds what you thought was possible in terms of its popularity!

Personally I feel its best to avoid signing up with StartLogic's web hosting service. Of the three web hosting services we used, StartLogic proved time and again to be the least reliable with sudden and prolonged service disruptions. One Saturday our website was down for over 8 hours costing us a lot of advertising revenue while we were hosted with their company.

Be prepared

The internet can prove a daunting place for anyone new starting up a website. One of the most effective things you can do is arm yourself with as much knowledge beforehand and have a plan in place if you are fortunate enough to receive a large amount of traffic to your website.

If this is all overwhelming, just remember to start off small and simple and try and keep learning as much as possible.

Hopefully this will help out any other starting off web entrepreneurs planning on starting on their own web projects. From my past experience we quickly realized that sudden success can bring about its fair share of problems but in the end its worth it! Good luck!