Can Your Website Take The Strain Of Holiday Traffic?

Is your web hosting solution strong enough to handle increased traffic over the holiday period?

For many small businesses a shared hosting package provides ample resources, keeping your website live and available for customers to find important information about your business. Even some e-commerce sites are underpinned by shared hosting; it is a cost-effective solution and great for getting started online.

One downside of shared hosting is that it is just that: shared. All the resources of the server are distributed between several customers, and things can get a little crowded and slow when any one of those sites on the server receives a spike in traffic.

The holidays are just around the corner, and many of us are choosing to order our Christmas shopping from online stores. From baubles to iPads, the nation of shoppers can find many of their gifts and other holiday necessities with a simple Google search, without braving the cold temperatures and frayed tempers which are staples of British holiday season high streets.

Can your business afford to miss out on this extra online activity?

If your website can’t handle a jump in traffic then you could end up missing out on festive revenue. Everyone knows that downtime costs money, and in this month alone many businesses generate substantially more sales than throughout the earlier months.

Should one of the websites hosted on your shared server start receiving abundant traffic, there will be less bandwidth available for your site and as a result your site will become slow and sluggish. Most online shoppers expect a website to load in three seconds or less, and will abandon a page that takes longer than this to load. This unfortunately doesn’t leave you much of a window to impress, and if your site is bogged down by another bandwidth hogger you will pay the price in abandoned website visits; every website visitor is a potential customer!

UK2 offers two web hosting alternatives to shared hosting which could help you manage the Christmas spike in traffic and provide you with a more dependable hosting infrastructure. For those who mean serious e-commerce business the following services from UK2 should be considered:

SSD VPS

An affordable yet powerful solution, SSD VPS hosting will provide you with your own dedicated partition of a server. All of the resources are yours, so there’ll be no noisy neighbours using up all your bandwidth allowance and slowing your website down. In addition, these servers are pretty flexible so you can scale up or down on resources as you require. That means over the holidays if you need some extra va va voom for your website you can scale up your solution and forget any downtime worries.

Find out what it’s all about here.

Dedicated Hosting

For businesses who anticipate heavy traffic in future, or are planning any significant growth, a dedicated server is the perfect option. The entire server machine is – as the name suggests – dedicated entirely to you: you own the full server. You’ll benefit from unlimited bandwidth and as much storage as you require, and the packages are priced accordingly. Dedicated hosting does cost more than SSD VPS and shared hosting, but it will save money in the long run by keeping your website live on the ‘net and running quickly and smoothly.

Check out our dedicated hosting packages here.

Happy holidays from everyone at UK2!