Today we wanted to bang the drum about hosting and skilled database and server management.

Often hosting is seen as a minor subject to think about when creating a new website or looking at SEO – Search Engine Optimisation. However, as we have been saying for years. Hosting is very, very important. It falls into the pot of ‘you get what you pay for’. In other words if you pay for cheap hosting then expect to have issues if your website becomes popular.

As live example last night shows us demand can come from the most unlikely quarter.

CAN YOUR WEBSITE STILL PROVIDE YOUR VISITORS WITH PAGES AND NOT BECOME EITHER VERY SLOW OR EVEN GO DOWN ALTOGETHER?

A client of ours (sorry I can’t say who as I don’t have their permission) has a very popular website anyway, with over 50,000 users per month normally. But when something changes, i.e. a link to it from the NHS website or via the BBC then the numbers shoot up.

There was a sudden spike yesterday, which is great as clearly the information on this website is proven to be very useful for visitors – right now. The level is continuing to be high and we expect these numbers for the duration of the current crisis.

We have been monitoring the traffic to this website, and the server response to the demand as we anticipated this spike – and it came. By us monitoring the website and server we can look at mitigating the spikes, ensuring that the website speed is not affected and that all concurrent users can access what they want, when they want it. This is also true of the databases that in this case, they were searching.

The question is: Can your server cope with an increase along these lines? Can your website still provide your visitors with pages and not become either very slow or even go down altogether?

The basics point of this post is that we encourage everyone to double check the capacity of their hosting provision to ensure that it is robust, resilient and ‘up to the job’ if called upon in big numbers.

As always if you have questions, then we are here to help.

That’s all. Stay safe.

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