After a quiet Christmas Day, Boxing Day can be a hectic time for website owners who have to be prepared for the annual sales and the spike in traffic this causes. However, expectations can quickly turn into frustration if your web hosting isn’t able to handle the rush of visitors. Here’s how to judge whether your website has the right hosting solution for peak periods like Boxing Day.
Understand your hosting needs
To ensure your hosting can meet your Boxing Day needs, you first need to know what those needs are going to be. This means you will have to predict how much traffic your website is likely to get on the sales days. The best way to estimate traffic is to analyse your traffic data history and look at how many visitors you were getting on previous peak shopping days.
Simple visitor counts on their own, however, are not enough. While a web server can often handle large numbers of visitors if they all come one at a time, it can start to struggle if you get many people on your site at the same time. This is because the number of simultaneous requests your server has to process will increase. Looking at your analytics to see how long typical visitors stay on your site can help you estimate how much simultaneous traffic your server will have to cope with.
Another factor to consider is how your traffic data has changed over time. If there is an upward trend, it means you can anticipate even more visitors during this peak than previously. If they are also staying longer, then this is where you need to question whether your hosting plan is sufficient as the number of people on the site at one time will increase too.
Another thing that can influence the amount of traffic your site will receive is how heavily you have been advertising your Boxing Day sale.
Do you need to upgrade to a bigger hosting plan?
It is difficult to judge whether you have the right plan for your expected traffic. It would be easier if web hosts were able to tell you precisely how many daily and simultaneous visitors your hosting plan can cope with, but there are so many factors that can affect this that it is virtually impossible to give an answer. The truth is that no two hosting plans are the same; servers themselves vary widely from host to host; and with shared hosting, the server’s performance can be affected if other websites on the server are busy too.
One thing that can tell you if your hosting plan is not up to the task is to analyse your website’s performance during busy periods. If you find that it loads slower or even temporarily goes offline, then it’s a clear indication that the server struggles during periods of heavy traffic. If this is the case and your traffic is likely to be even greater during this Boxing Day, then the impact could be worse. If in any doubt, the best option would be to contact your web host. A good host will either put your mind at rest or find the best solution for moving forward.
What options are available?
If your website has shared hosting and you think your plan is insufficient for your Boxing Day traffic, then there are several options you can choose from. The first and least expensive is to opt for a bigger and better shared hosting plan. To ensure good performance, check the plan offers technologies like Intel Xeon CPUs, SSD storage and automatic data caching. Unmetered bandwidth is also essential as it means there is no restriction on the amount of data transferred to and from your website. This is crucial for maintaining good site performance during busy periods like Boxing Day.
Of course, all servers have limits in terms of storage, RAM, CPU, etc., and when these resources are shared by a large number of websites, it can affect the busiest sites. If you think that your website is outgrowing its shared hosting, then the next option to consider is VPS hosting.
A VPS is a virtual private server. Websites hosted on VPS have a small server all to themselves. They do not share it with other websites and so are not affected by busy neighbours. What’s more, all the server’s resources are your own and these are considerably more generous than those on shared hosting, making them ideal for websites with growing traffic.
Conclusion
Boxing Day can be one of the most lucrative days of the year for websites but the likely increase in traffic could backfire if it puts too much strain on your hosting. Hopefully, from reading this article, you’ll now have a better understanding of how to predict your website’s traffic on peak days, judge whether your current plan is sufficient for your needs and know what to look for if you want to upgrade.
For more information, check out our high-performance Shared Hosting and VPS Hosting plans.
