The challenge
Website traffic can change quickly. Marketing campaigns, media coverage, breaking news and other external events can cause sudden increases in visitors, placing additional pressure on hosting infrastructure.
If your platform does not have sufficient capacity to accommodate these spikes, website performance can suffer at the point when demand is highest, resulting in slow load times or periods of unavailability.
Our approach
When designing hosting infrastructure for a high-traffic website, our first priority is understanding how the site is used. We review typical traffic levels, previous peaks and the events that are likely to cause increases in demand, alongside the performance and availability requirements of the website.
Following a review of your existing environment, our engineers design a bespoke hosting platform around these requirements. This includes planning sufficient capacity to accommodate changes in traffic while considering the compute, storage and networking resources required by the website.
Where sudden traffic spikes are a concern, scalability allows additional resources to be made available as demand increases. This helps maintain website performance during periods of high traffic without requiring you to permanently provision infrastructure around peak demand.
Performance also depends on more than capacity alone. We consider how the wider hosting environment is configured around the website and can carry out testing to understand how the platform performs under load.
For websites handling personal, account or payment information, security requirements are considered as part of the infrastructure design. The appropriate controls will depend on the data being processed and the wider requirements of the organisation.
Our hosting platforms are fully managed, with 24/7/365 monitoring and support from our engineering team. Through proactive monitoring, we can identify potential infrastructure issues and respond before they develop into incidents that affect website performance or availability.
The outcome
Scalable managed hosting provides high-traffic websites with infrastructure that can accommodate changes in demand while maintaining consistent performance for visitors.
By designing capacity around both normal traffic and periods of increased demand, organisations can prepare their websites for sudden spikes without maintaining unnecessary resources at all times.
Ongoing monitoring and management also provides access to technical engineers 24/7/365, reducing the infrastructure management required from internal teams and helping maintain the performance and availability of the platform.
When should you consider scalable hosting for a high-traffic website?
If changes in visitor numbers are beginning to affect website performance or place pressure on your existing infrastructure, it may be time to review whether your hosting environment can accommodate future demand.
Common signs include:
- Your website slows down or becomes unavailable during periods of high traffic.
- Campaigns, media coverage or external events regularly cause sudden increases in visitors.
- Your existing hosting environment has limited capacity to accommodate traffic spikes.
- You are maintaining additional infrastructure throughout the year primarily to prepare for occasional periods of high demand.
- Performance problems are affecting how quickly visitors can access your website.
- Your internal team is spending significant time monitoring and managing hosting infrastructure.
Customer case study
This approach was used when supporting Meningitis Research Foundation (MRF), a charity funding research into meningitis and septicaemia while providing information and support to people affected by the diseases.
MRF’s website provides important information to the public and can experience significant increases in traffic following awareness campaigns or news reports about clusters of meningitis. During these periods, the charity needed its website to accommodate additional demand while continuing to give visitors quick access to information.
Its previous website also experienced slow load times and was not optimised for mobile, despite mobile devices accounting for 60-70% of website traffic.
Hyve worked with the charity to provide the infrastructure, performance and security required for its new website.
The new environment provided additional capacity to support peaks in visitor numbers while improving overall website performance. Average load times were recorded at 684ms, helping visitors access information more quickly. Security was also strengthened for areas of the website handling account and payment information associated with online donations.
As Rob Dawson, then Head of Communications at Meningitis Research Foundation, explained:
“It’s crucial for people to be able to quickly access our lifesaving information, and we can already see that hosting the website with Hyve is helping significantly with that.”
