The day before the leaving cert is traditionally our busiest day of the year on theleavingcert.com. How busy? Well, as we found out on tuesday, busy enough to crash the server it was hosted on…
Last year, traffic peaked at about 3,700 visits. By lunchtime on Tuesday, just before the site went offline, we had about 2,500 visits. So i’m guesstimating, but we could have gotten up to 10,000 visits on Tuesday had the site not gone down. We hadn’t really predicted or prepared for that kind of traffic.
To cut a long story short, we moved the site on to a new cloud server with dediserve. The benefits of that (apart from obviously getting the site back online), are automated backups, more speed, plenty of capacity and should we need to upgrade quickly again, it can be done instantly. No transferring files on to a new server or signing up for a new package and terminating the old one etc…
photo credit: Darren Hester
The downside is that it’s costing about 6 times more than our last hosting package (which was shared hosting). So it may not make sense to keep the site running at that cost when really it only needs to be there for one month of the year. You also need some degree of technical knowledge to get things up and running however the guys at dediserve are more than willing to help out.
But there’s no doubt about it, the cloud makes everything so much easier and less painful. It means for me, i can start to focus on driving traffic to theleavingcert.com again rather than worrying about whether it can cope with it all 🙂
Today, although there’s a few minutes left yet, theleavingcert.com has broke another traffic record. 5,100+ visits. It really is snowballing year after year and i keep saying it, but we’ve so many more features to come…
Would you not just have negotiated with your current provider to get them to increase capacity at this time of year?
we were told we’d have to sign up to a new package and move the site ourselves so not much help there…Â it was quicker to go with dediserve, plus we wanted to make absolutely sure we could scale again quickly if need be… (our previous provider doesn’t do cloud hosting, only VPS which would have done the job but didn’t work out all that cheaper than dediserve)…