After surfing the web today, I noticed two sites that had problems and I know for sure, one was due to heavy traffic and I think the other was as well.
One, RickLatona.com’s advertising skin on NamePros.com cause a buzz getting over 274 posts and 3,295 views in about 2 hours! And that was only a Whoa thread about the color changes etc. I had noticed several threads about people saying they had issues with the site and signing up for the news letter was not working.
Rick is a wealthy person and runs several large businesses, so he has a team in place and the money to fix these things and that’s why the problem was small. Now a little guy like me, I do not have a team in place and I also would hate to lose the "chance" when my site happens to be placed in a news story or whatever.
Example number 2. A story on Yahoo! today about a Local guy (to me) and talking about being a "Modder". I was like, cool, this is a must read. A local guy, making some cool stuff etc. So I try to check out his personal site, but it’s dead!!! It’s been dead all freakin day since the story broke. So I have yet to see the site, but I keep checking. The problem is, 99.9% of the time you will not have people "Rechecking" to see if the site is working or not.
I am not tech guy, but from my searches on the next, the biggest and main reasons sites go down, is because of the server. So do not use "free" hosting! Use a good company that will assist you and provide you with a good service.
Prepair ahead if you can. If you are doing an advertising effort, have backup servers to go to, incase of a mad rush. A company like http://www.akamai.com/ can help out with this. They also build major systems and offer many products and services so you wouldn’t even need to worry.
Get a "team" but not really. If you need assistance, at least have somebody set up if you need them. You will have to pay for this, but it will be worth it and it makes you smart, by planning ahead.
Jamie Zoch www.DotWeekly.com
Mark Fulton
Another useful tool that can prevent this effect is the WordPress Cache plugin.
Even if you don’t have mass traffic this can speed up your site significantly.
***Jamie Say’s***
Thank you for the heads up Mark! I will have to give it a try.