Thank you for reading “Traffic Overload Solutions” by “Geeky Duck”. We all know it’s a nightmare when you find your server is dying due to the massive traffic hitting your website. You will try anything to get your server good again and some of you might go crazy.

Actually, I should say “Congrats”, this is a good problem to have 🙂

First of all, prepare a lot of coffee, you might need to work over night to get things done a.s.a.p because:

1. Your Search Engine Ranking will be affected if your server is dead or slow in response.
2. In case you are monetizing your website, you are losing your earning as well as the trustworthy of your sites.
3. You are losing an opportunity to get bigger. Imagine your webpages are getting traffic because you have good content, but your potential audience can’t even load the website, and they will never be back again.

Solution 1: Purchase and add a CDN (Content Delivery Network) Immediately

By adding a CDN, you can immediately save up to 80% server load within 30 minutes. A CDN basically store all your images, CSS and JavaScript on the cloud.

There are many CDN Provider out there, but you are running out of time. Try MaxCDN or CloudFront as they are quite easy to set up.

Solution 2: Purchase  another powerful server

You will need a more powerful server anyway, this solution is not going to solve your current server issue immediately as it need some time to migrate your servers. However is good for you to learn How to migrate your server and lower server downtime.

Solution 3: Cache your content

By caching your content, you can save up to 70% server load. The volume of query to the database will be dramatically reduced. If you are using WordPress, try to cache your content using WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache

Solution 4: Setup a cheap Load Balancing

A load balancer is a piece of hardware comes with multiple dedicated servers. Setting up a load balancer can be very very expensive and it’s not going to be done over night. However, you can setup a cheap, and fast load balancing using a Round-Robin DNS.

Although round robin DNS is very easy to set up, it has problematic drawbacks.  If your server was falling overload, Round-Robin DNS might be a good choice, at least it solve your problem immediately.

Read more: How to Setup a Cheap Load Balancing using Round-Robin DNS

Related: 7 Important Cloud-Based Tools for Load Testing

Solution 5: Setup a Cloud Hosting

A Cloud hosting is like combining a CDN with widely distributed server. By moving to a cloud hosting, you are pretty much Pay-As-You-Grow. Your website and database is on the cloud! The data charges might be slightly expensive compare with your current hosting but you are worry free from the load and scalability.

Try Amazon AWS or Digital Ocean, you can manage to set up a scalable server setups over night, if you have enough coffee.