How do you recover if your website is taken down for excessive usage?

Suppose you're on something cheap, like the $5.95 plan from Bluehost or the 'hatching plan' from hostgator, obviously "unlimited bandwidth" (as they advertise) does not mean an unlimited surge in traffic.

So let's say you get an unexpected surge in traffic and your site shuts down, what can you do to quickly recover? For example, let's say you're on a cheap plan and your site is shut down for all the traffic, can you quickly upgrade your plan and get your site back up?

Can these hosting providers do that? If they can, what would you upgrade to? If you're on hostgator for instance, can you quickly switch to the 'Business Plan' for $12/month and have your site back up immediately?

 

For me, I use multiple DNS hosting using cloud flare.

The website load is minimize if you get traffic surge.

 

Most decent hosts will certainly allow you to upgrade, and quickly at that. As far as these "unlimited" plans? What do you upgrade to? Their Super Secret Double Unlimited Plan? I know HostGator is big on forcing their shared clients to VPS when they start using too many resources, but that is mainly CPU, RAM, etc. I'm sure they could just upgrade your bandwidth. Whether or not they will is another story entirely.

One huge problem with these "unlimited" hosts is quite simply that you don't really know what you're getting. If you don't know how much bandwidth they will actually allow you to use, how do you plan for traffic spikes? Heck, how do you plan for average, everyday traffic?

On the other side, if you have a host that gives you 10GB of bandwidth a month, and 10 higher plans, not only do you know what kind of bandwidth you are going to be allowed to use, but you can also be reasonably assured that you can upgrade to one of their higher plans at any time.

And then there are hosts who are very reasonable and care about their clients. I have a client on an old 5GB bandwidth plan, for example. He uses his site to push photos from his webcam. Due to a mistake on another site, his bandwidth was getting eaten up pretty quickly. We noticed it and brought it to his attention (he hadn't noticed) proactively. He then discovered the issue, and tried to fix it. By the time he fixed it, he used about 10GB of bandwidth for the month. We bumped his bandwidth up before it became an issue, i.e. account suspension or such, and didn't charge him a dime. We could have asked him to upgrade. We could have suspended his account. We could have charged him for bandwidth overages

He has been a client for a while now. We know his average bandwidth usage, and recognized proactively that there was going to be a spike in traffic. We don't always notice, and of course, we don't always make such offers to our clients, but we felt it was a good gesture.

Point being, I know many hosts who would do the same thing. I have worked with many good people in this industry over the years, and a lot of hosts out there are very reasonable, and care very much about providing good customer service.

It might come down to simply asking your host. Ask them what will happen if you have a spike in traffic, and if there is any way to mitigate that spike and keep your site alive.

 

I would rather go with hosts that are reliable and those who wont shut you're sites down during traffic spikes.
Check Sacredserver.com , they send a notice about the excessive usage and dont shut you're site down immediately. They give time to upgrade .

 

Well WSWD matched it perfect. Theres not that much more to add. Just make sure you know what you're getting. Especially if you're on shared host, make sure you know how much of the CPU you're allowed to use, bandwidth etc.

As for the upgrades, most of the time, upgrades can be done instantly

 

Thanks for the advice guys.

And what exactly is CloudFlare? How does it work? It has a free option but I don't exactly get it? If your site shuts down, do they bring it back up?

 

No, if your site is down, your site is down.

Here is more or less what Cloudflare does if your site is down:

So if you have a dynamic site, forum, take orders, etc., it is completely useless for that.

 

Well these tips are really good you all shared here. Thanks for it.

 

Thanks for these tips

 

What if the site is simply a landing page where users enter their email address?

 

Almost certainly not going to work. What happens when the user enters their email address? Goes into a database or something, or??

 

Well if you're using something like Sendgrid or Mailchimp the data is simply sent to their servers (actually goes directly to their URL)

 

Hmmmmm. Not sure about that. The page might actually work, but I wouldn't count on it.