Woes of Having a High Traffic Site

OK, some of you will think I am extremely annoying for complaining about having a high-traffic website. Honestly, I am extremely thankful for having a popular site and love it. Even the problems. But it really is high-stress…

Let me tell you how much work it truly can be when you are managing everything on your own. Today, (Tuesday) the sh*t hit the fan in a bad way. I’ll start with a brief history of my web hosting situations:

When I first started my “popular” website, I was using Hostgator’s Baby hosting plan. Which meant at the time, something along the lines of $9.99 a month and 70GB of bandwidth a month. (I may be off a little with the estimates - it’s been a while. They have since increased their bandwidth in their plans). All was fine until my site started getting a few thousand people a day. I was using quite a bit of bandwidth and needed a new solution.

My next step was a bad one… I had a few different websites, so I decided to get a Site5 account - their deal was something like 5 accounts, 200GB of transfer, for $24.99 a month. After a couple of good months with them, things went downhill quick. My site was down way too often. Site5 ended up being a complete and utter nightmare. My site was down for - on average - a half hour a week. UNACCEPTABLE. I won’t even get into the whole nightmare story behind their hosting my site. (Search the internet - you can find many horror stories about their hosting reputation).

Anyway… I went back to Hostgator - to their Swamp plan, which was 100GB of bandwidth per month. Things were good - I had little to no problems. But then my web traffic increased yet again, and one month, I came up to like 97 GB of bandwidth. It was time to find yet another new solution. So I switched to Hostgator’s semi-dedicated plan at $75 a month.

I did that for about 6 months… thing were OK. My traffic meanwhile increased more and more. I started having problems with high server loads. I started getting around 20,000 visitors a day on average, and apparently someone else on the semi-ded server I was on complained. (I don’t blame them - I would complain if another site was sucking up all my resources!) The tech support at Hostgator informed me that I had no choice but to upgrade to my own dedicated server. So I did… at $174 a month, for their lowest plan.

Things went badly for at first… I was still crashing the server for some reason, so they had to do some CPU tweaking to optimize things. After a few bad days, things were fixed and running smoothly. This was January of this year.

Fast-forward until Sunday night of last week (two days ago)… I was working on a new template for my site. Things were fine and dandy in the hosting sector. My website was averaging anywhere from 30,000 to 60,000 visits per day, and 100,000-200,000 pageviews per day. Until… the site started timing out Sunday night, around 4am. (Yes, I tend to burn the midnight oil). For some reason, I would get a “page busy, not loading, etc” error message for 10 minutes, then suddenly the site would be fine again. I was confused, but wasted no time in contacting tech support. I was up literally all night Sunday trying to figure out what was going on, submitting a ticket, calling support, etc. I went to bed at 7am Monday morning, hoping things would be OK by the time I woke up.

It wasn’t.

To make an already long story short, the April edition of “Allure” magazine published an article that mentioned my website. It has brought even more traffic, and my poor website’s server couldn’t handle any more. I spent most of Monday freaking out, then Hostgator finally rebooted my site in the evening, and everything was OK. Until this morning, that is… today was a bad day. I spent the entire day going back and forth with tech support in emails, phone calls and live chats. I even spoke with the owner of Hostgator! It turns out that the regular dedicated plan wasn’t enough to handle my website’s traffic. Things crashed and burned, big time.

I ended up having to upgrade to Hostgator’s most powerful plan - which is $374 a month (gulp) because my old server sh*t the bed. After a conversation with Hostgator’s owner, I agreed to switch to their pro plan. It took some convincing on his part, believe me… I couldn’t figure out why my site was fine for a couple of months and would suddenly go “kaput”. Anyway, the new server should be able to handle my site’s traffic unless it gets around 90,000 visitors per day. (Damn, would that be awesome…) He pulled me some strings and got the server set up within hours, which would normally take 24-48 hours. Which I am extremely grateful for.

Yep, this took pretty much 2 days. I barely ate a thing in that time, didn’t get to work out at all, and probably lost a few years of life due to stress. (I live from the ad revenue of this website, and several of the ad companies pay you according to how many pageviews you get in a month).  I knew that article was sending more people to my site, and I knew if they got an error message instead of the site, they would probably give up and go elsewhere.
I probably lost out on thousands of new site visitors in the time my site was down today… But the only thing I can do is keep going. The new server is in place, and let me tell you, it is so lightening fast I can’t believe it. Let’s hope it stays that way.

Do you still want a high-traffic site?