Website hosting for site the only gets two huge spikes a year?
October 30, 2018 9:23 AM Subscribe
I run a few events that get a mild amount of traffic throughout the year that cheap-o hosting plans are perfectly fine for. However, on the weekend of the event, and initial ticket on sale dates, our sites will crash due to the traffic spike. Are there any hosting suggestions for this scenario - something flexible so that I can possibly only pay for dedicated server level traffic during select periods?
Note: my hosting company says I have to go with a dedicated server, or stick to shared and have the crashes continue... there is no in between. The difference is $120/year vs $1200+/year, at least! Though this may be a necessary investment, I'm looking to save $$$.
Note: my hosting company says I have to go with a dedicated server, or stick to shared and have the crashes continue... there is no in between. The difference is $120/year vs $1200+/year, at least! Though this may be a necessary investment, I'm looking to save $$$.
What are you running. There’s like a million ways to do this now days. Heroku, elastic beanstalk (AWS), Google Cloud. Heroku is by far the simplest of these solutions ive found
posted by bitdamaged at 10:21 AM on October 30, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by bitdamaged at 10:21 AM on October 30, 2018 [1 favorite]
I believe with WebFaction you could scale up to Cloud VPS for your spikes and run regular shared the rest of the year. Send them an email. Their CS is fantastic.
posted by humboldt32 at 10:21 AM on October 30, 2018
posted by humboldt32 at 10:21 AM on October 30, 2018
Since you say it crashes on ticket sales day, I have to ask, are you using this site to do the actual ticket sales? Could you outsource that part? If you already do, and the site is crashing due to load on event weekends, you should look into what kind of caching your app/platform/etc have available.
posted by advicepig at 10:31 AM on October 30, 2018
posted by advicepig at 10:31 AM on October 30, 2018
You don't mention what your host is on now - e.g., is your site WordPress, Drupal, something else?
Depending on traffic, and your site platform, this is somewhere between trivial and moderately easy. Nth'ing - this is what cloud providers are for. You do not need a dedicated host - you just need to pick the right cloud platform / provider and be ready to pay for a bit more horsepower when you have spikes.
If you have a static site you can plop that onto S3 or something similar. No work necessary to prep for spikes. If you are using a db-driven platform like WordPress, you may need to do a bit more work. But not a lot.
posted by jzb at 10:32 AM on October 30, 2018
Depending on traffic, and your site platform, this is somewhere between trivial and moderately easy. Nth'ing - this is what cloud providers are for. You do not need a dedicated host - you just need to pick the right cloud platform / provider and be ready to pay for a bit more horsepower when you have spikes.
If you have a static site you can plop that onto S3 or something similar. No work necessary to prep for spikes. If you are using a db-driven platform like WordPress, you may need to do a bit more work. But not a lot.
posted by jzb at 10:32 AM on October 30, 2018
If it's static, S3. If not, Nearly Free Speech has been covering this pay-as-you-go not-really-a-niche for decades now.
posted by dmd at 11:39 AM on October 30, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by dmd at 11:39 AM on October 30, 2018 [3 favorites]
DreamHost used to tout this sort of feature. A Slashdotting or surge of this sort was just fine. If the shared hosting bit is working fine for you, maybe check out other providers who'll not make a big deal about 2/year spikes in traffic/resources.
posted by zengargoyle at 1:59 PM on October 30, 2018
posted by zengargoyle at 1:59 PM on October 30, 2018
Everyone else's suggestions are more optimal and more durable, better-designed solutions without the headaches of managing a server or juggling your hosting, but just to answer your question literally: Amazon EC2 and its ilk are specifically designed for metered on-demand use of virtual servers.
So since you know ahead of time when the traffic spikes are coming, it would be technically possible, if you can replicate your environment in something like an EC2 instance, to do as you suggest and temporarily point your DNS entries to a virtual server just on the weekends in question. But you should pursue one or more of these other suggestions instead.
posted by XMLicious at 5:29 AM on October 31, 2018
So since you know ahead of time when the traffic spikes are coming, it would be technically possible, if you can replicate your environment in something like an EC2 instance, to do as you suggest and temporarily point your DNS entries to a virtual server just on the weekends in question. But you should pursue one or more of these other suggestions instead.
posted by XMLicious at 5:29 AM on October 31, 2018
This thread is closed to new comments.
Instead of being wed to certain hardware, the whole infrastructure, bandwidth, number of processor cores and such will flex up to what you actually need, when you need it, then back down again. And you pay by what you use, which is more annoying, planning wise, since you are nickel and diming every little thing, but usually inexpensive in the aggregate.
posted by rokusan at 9:40 AM on October 30, 2018 [4 favorites]