How to handle high traffic websites

How to properly run a website that is supposed to receive a high volume of traffic

First of all, what is a “high traffic website”?


It is a website that will receive many daily visits and also many visits at the same time. Usually, famous online newspapers, service providers (Google, for example), e-commerce sites like eBay and Amazon, YouTube, Facebook, Baidu in China, Yandex in Russia, Wikipedia... You can see the list of the most popular websites around the world on Alexa.

Going back to our real dimensions, we can consider that over 100,000 visitors per month are “many visitors”.

Can normal hosting bear the weight of 100,000 visitors per month? If it is a static website, yes! A static website is one that does not use a database or uses it indirectly. For example, posts in a blog where the page is created by a database (WordPress, CMS Made Simple, or other platforms that use static plugin rendering) but once served, it is static and does not interact anymore. An e-commerce site, on the other hand, is constantly interacting with the database.

So for your 100,000 visits a day, your “shared hosting” can still do a great job if it is quality hosting. If you have an e-commerce site with that amount of visits, you might want to review your “hardware”.

When is it time to change the hosting? ONLY when problems arise. Or in a new project after evaluating the situation.

What to do when the website starts to become too slow and delivers “errors” instead of pages? If you started small, your website is probably hosted on shared hosting. Changing from shared hosting to a VPS (Virtual Private Server) or a dedicated server can turn out to be an unnecessary expense. Often, a good shared hosting plan can guarantee better performance than moving to a higher-cost alternative if the shared hosting is of high quality.

So why do people use VPS and private servers?

Usually, you need a VPS to perform operations that are not typically allowed on a shared environment: special applications, test purpose websites, intranets between company branches, and other unique situations requiring total access to server configuration or in-house security management (like a financial institution). But for an e-commerce platform like Magento or Prestashop (regardless of size), or a normal website, shared hosting with improved resources can work very well and in a more secure way.
To read more: VPS: to be or not to be?

This avoids the huge cost of a managed server or the headache of an unmanaged server. If you can manage it yourself, that's another matter, and you could probably write this article better!

So now, going back to the problem: when the number of visitors and operations reaches and overwhelms the limits of the resources allocated in shared hosting, what to do?

If you already know you are booming and will be using a worldwide audience with millions of users (so you will be a higher-tier customer), our suggested solution is to go safe: use Google Cloud servers (we removed all Amazon Cloud server services due to complaints about their customer service). This doesn't mean that the Google solution is the best in the whole world (I haven't tested all the solutions available on this planet—maybe you can: IBM Cloud, DigitalOcean, Linode, or Vultr)—but it surely guarantees the stability, reliability, and trust that you are looking for.

However, if you are booming but more locally, many hosting companies now offer improved/boosted shared hosting services based on performance and scalable resources with redundancy between servers. We use Namecheap and Netsons.
We will simply install your platform (e-commerce, blog) or create your HTML/PHP customized website using one of these infrastructures.

No more comparing computers offered by different companies or the RAM available in various VPS packages. No more coding all the pages to use an appropriate CDN (Content Delivery Network). We simply “travel safe” using Cloud Platforms where we will deploy your website.
Here are a few informative links:

Google Cloud Engine

Netsons Cloud

Pricing

How to determine the cost of the website and the hosting for a high traffic website?


A practical example can help to understand the price structure:

A professional e-commerce price: 25,000 THB (from our pricing page), first year, on renewal 6,560 THB

Deployment service: 4800/year = 4,800 THB (the deployment services costs vary depending on the project)

An average cloud fee for a big e-commerce with plenty of images, articles to handle much more than 100,000 visits/month (example only: 4 GB Memory, 2 Core Processor, 80 GB SSD Disk, 4 TB Transfer) = 15,000 THB/year


As you can see, it is still an affordable price. Please consider that this is an example; the example price of the e-commerce does not include insertion of articles and categories, customization, training, and possibly taxation.

Note

For high traffic websites, a real quotation in advance is not appropriate because several cloud service prices are based on resource usage (as well as our tasks). We will, however, prepare a forecast study on a case-by-case basis.