November 15, 2023
Effectively maintaining website performance is crucial for the success of any business. In the realm of online business, fluctuations in website traffic are inevitable – from periods of low activity to sudden surges. While traffic dynamics are influenced by your marketing efforts and business strategies, the ultimate determinant of performance lies in your website's scalability and its ability to gracefully handle varying levels of traffic. Rapid surges in website traffic, especially during peak times, can pose challenges to performance. This can lead to issues such as slowdowns or even website crashes, potentially impacting your online presence negatively.
Experiencing rapid spikes in traffic is a common occurrence for video streaming platforms during live events and eCommerce businesses during peak sales seasons.
To consistently deliver optimal user experiences, it's imperative to implement top-notch website performance management strategies. This ensures that your website operates seamlessly and effectively handles varying levels of traffic.
Reasons Behind Sudden Traffic Surge
Various factors can contribute to a sudden increase in website traffic. Effectively managing this traffic is critical for business growth in today's digital landscape. Here are some key reasons for unexpected surges in website visits:
Successful Marketing Campaign
Executing an online marketing campaign, whether on search engines or social media platforms, has the potential to draw significant traffic to your website. With the right approach and a well-planned strategy, you can successfully attract a substantial audience.
Trending in Press
If your business becomes newsworthy, anticipate a rapid influx of traffic. Gaining attention in trends or news stories can introduce new users to your website, resulting in a swift increase in traffic.
Bot Attacks
Website traffic can also surge for negative reasons. Unexpected increases in traffic may be the result of malicious bot attacks. Through distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, perpetrators can inundate your website with heavy traffic, posing potential threats to its normal operation.
eCommerce Sales / Seasonal Occasions
For eCommerce and entertainment businesses, especially those involved in video streaming, significant traffic spikes are common during specific events. Festive sales, product launches, or special promotions can trigger a rapid and substantial increase in traffic within a matter of minutes.
How to Deal With Rapid High Traffic?
Managing sudden surges in website traffic is a challenging task that requires a well-thought-out strategy. Being prepared is key, and there are various methods to effectively handle increased traffic on your website. Here are some of them:
- Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) is a great tool for cache content to make it easy for users to get content faster. In CDN, there are multiple servers that can handle the load without any issues. It also helps to prevent cyberattacks like DDoS.
- Load balancing solutions are also a great solution to deal with high traffic that comes in a short span of time. Load balancing solutions can manage traffic and handle HTTP requests with ease.
- You should optimise your website content to ensure faster loading of the web pages when there is high traffic. Reducing the media size and minifying HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files are some of the key steps to take into consideration.
- Choosing a hosting solution with faster storage is also a great option that helps in better website performance. Using SSD for storage can help your website in providing a quality user experience.
- If you want to work with the latest technology, cut operational costs, and don’t want to oversize your existing digital infrastructure, AWS is the best option to consider. With cloud deployment, it is easy to manage traffic peaks while optimising costs.
Choose AWS Solutions to Manage Traffic Surges
If you want to manage the high traffic during sales season for your eCommerce business or to streamline content delivery for your website during traffic surges, AWS cloud solutions are the best choice. There are many benefits of adopting AWS solutions in cases of traffic surges, and here are some of the main ones:
Instant scalability
When there is high traffic on your website, you need to scale up instantly. Traffic surges on your website can negatively affect your business, if not prepared. In the case of peak load conditions, your business infrastructure needs to be working for the load without any manual work. AWS auto-scaling ensures peak performance without any interruption in website performance. It will meet your demands by automatically adding more resources to scale up or down whenever needed. To save costs, you also get scale-down features when traffic decreases after a certain time.
Seamless Performance
AWS is the biggest cloud service provider with its data centres across the globe. It helps with the seamless distribution of traffic to ensure optimised performance no matter what the volume of the traffic. When there is a need, it can scale up or automatically get to the best shape. It makes the AWS cloud services the most cost-effective option.
Reliability
AWS is trusted by countless businesses across the globe for cloud needs. With many services to manage traffic and make your business reach the best shape, and high availability and risk tolerance, it is the best choice you can make for making your business stand out. The implementation of distributed systems is a proactive measure to prevent potential downtime, ensuring continuous service availability.
Pay-as-you-go model
AWS is very cost-effective for many reasons and its pay-as-you-go model is the best in this regard. In this model, you only pay for the services that you use. You can save costs and only pay for the cloud resources you use. There is no need to get a subscription. This choice allows you to pay for the exact duration during which you utilise resources and is applicable to all aspects, including databases and storage.
Quick Deployment
It is very easy to deploy the cloud in your business ecosystem whenever you need with AWS. It supports automation which makes scaling and management easier than ever. With this, you can handle traffic surges without any issues or time delays. With reduced latency, your online infrastructure can handle any volume of traffic without any additional cost. There is no need to manage anything manually and you can provide uninterrupted services to your user base.
Security measures
Security has always been one of the biggest concerns for online businesses. Whether you need to manage compliance with the cloud or keep your data secure, AWS is the best choice. This platform provides an array of tools designed for monitoring and analysing your business once deployed in the cloud. Essential for effectively managing increased traffic without concerns about potential threats, these tools allow you to optimise your system, ensuring it can effortlessly handle any type of traffic surge.
Top AWS Services for Handling Peak Traffic
AWS has a comprehensive range of services for managing your business’s online presence. To effectively manage peak traffic for your business, consider leveraging the traffic management offerings provided by AWS. It gives your business the ability to handle traffic and ensures a seamless performance for users coming to your platform. Here are the top AWS services that can help you manage traffic surges effortlessly:
Amazon CloudFront
It is a content delivery network (CDN) service that can be used to deliver any form of media and data to end users. You can use this to securely send every type of data with high speed and reduced latency. This cloud service helps with offloading traffic from the original server and improves the overall user experience with quick information.
AWS Global Accelerator
It is a networking service that makes it easy to handle traffic management to improve the overall performance by up to 60%. With this, you can ensure your availability no matter what the volume of traffic is. AWS has a strong global presence and this tool is a great way to distribute traffic across multiple regions and edge locations. It makes it easy for your business to handle any amount of traffic in a short span of time.
AWS Transit Gateway
It’s a network transit hub from AWS services. AWS Transit Gateway can be your centralised platform for managing your accounts and on-premise infrastructure. It is the best AWS service to manage your traffic flow. You can simplify traffic management with this as you can direct traffic to specific resources and scale up whenever there is any need.
Amazon ELB
Amazon Elastic Load Balancing can be used to distribute traffic across various edge locations. You can improve the availability of the content uniformly during the traffic surge using this. It works with automation, making it easy for you to ensure that you are allocating resources at the right place. You can easily handle sudden spikes in traffic and deliver unmatched performance without any performance delay.
Amazon EC2
If you want to scale your computing capacity without any additional infrastructure, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud is the best option to consider. You can meet the demand with ease and manage every scale of instant traffic surge to achieve the best possible performance. It is a very secure and resizable computing service which can be used for storage, networking, etc.
AWS Auto Scaling
If you want to manage the AWS services at the minimum possible cost and achieve the best performance when there is instant traffic, you should use AWS Auto Scaling. With this service, you can monitor your application and adjust the resources to get the best outcomes. It is a great help for businesses that want to scale up and scale down based on traffic needs. This service can help you with managing EC2, DynamoDB, and more services without any manual effort.
More AWS Services to Handle Traffic Surges
Other than these, there are many more services that can help with the management of traffic to deliver seamless performance to all users.
- Amazon Route 53: It is a scalable domain name system (DNS) web service from AWS. It is designed to route users to applications by changing domain names into IP addresses.
- AWS Lambda: This is a serverless computing service to scale up and run code, in any event, to handle the traffic. You can use this without needing any additional servers.
- Amazon SQS: It offers a secure and durable hosted queue system to integrate software into the business infrastructure. It is easy to decouple components and scale up using microservices using this AWS service offering.
- Amazon SNS: You can communicate and manage every type of load during traffic surges using this service.
Tips to Manage Traffic Surges With AWS
These services take care of virtually everything for you. Whether you require instant scaling or top-tier security, these offerings encompass a comprehensive range of solutions. If you use AWS correctly, it can cut your operational costs by over 40%. Here are some key tips on how to manage your online platform during peak traffic conditions:
- You should use the monitoring tools of AWS to analyse the performance and manage the traffic data. This will alert you in case of traffic surges and you can manage the scaling effectively.
- It is crucial to set up an alert with notifications when there is a traffic surge. You can respond quickly with notifications and ensure your platform faces no impact on user experience and overall performance.
- A strong plan is the key. You should have a strong strategy of how scaling would be done in case of an instant volume of overwhelming traffic. When you have a clear picture of your computing and network capabilities, you can make quality choices.
- While using AWS solutions, it's not necessary to monitor every detail meticulously, but it's crucial to ensure proper implementation to prevent potential issues and achieve optimal results.
Choose Dotsquares Experts for AWS Implementation
Cloud adoption allows you to attain optimal efficiency without the need for substantial investments in physical infrastructure. AWS Cloud services can render your business highly cost-effective even during traffic surges.
To ensure the effectiveness of this approach, correct implementation is paramount. Our AWS team is not only certified but has also successfully executed numerous projects for eCommerce and entertainment businesses, facilitating seamless and swift upscaling. Curious to learn more? Reach out to our AWS-certified team today!
