Will your success bring down your site?

Made Essential Reading on 27 April 2011 Felix Hemsley

Our online presences are increasingly the first point of call for potential customers, contacts and leads, but is that site able to handle a dramatic traffic shift. With the ever increasing use of corporate blogs, it’s easy to imagine how a single article may become your most valuable asset. Creating something which resonates with your audience is a vitally important aspect of writing a blog and whilst you hope it will be shared across the social web and read an inordinate number of times, have you considered the ramifications of what may happen if you’re a little more successful than you thought?

In my spare time, I write and manage a road biking blog which has now been running for almost 2 months. My existing community base (built up via twitter) helped support the blog launch and create a readership for my content, driving a regular base level of traffic. However, I began a discussion with an individual via twitter who was planning a trip away and was an ideal candidate for guest blogging. To cut a long story short, we posted her content upon her return and she let her community know. Little did I know that her community included the global press officers for one of the top pro cycling teams. Before I knew it I was being bombarded by emails asking if the content could be posted on team fan pages, pro teams were retweeting the content and the exclusive video and pictures were spreading like wild fire!

This was fantastic, what great exposure for the blog. The usual 15-25 visits a day we’re being over shadowed by the 150…200…250…300…visits it was now receiving. I couldn’t complain, I had been handed a silver platter of exclusive, high quality content. But I had made one oversight…my infrastructure. No sooner had I been high on the elation than I had an emergency email from my web host saying I had reached 98% of my traffic quota for the month. By the time I had logged in and upgraded my hosting package, my site was down. Visitors were met with dead pages, traffic was reaching a dead end. This looked bad, on both me and the author and every other person whom had shared the link!

If this had been a business scenario, these visitors could have been potential customers and all they would see is an error page. Hardly the ideal landing page solution! It’s hard to plan for traffic spikes, but it is something which should be carefully considered when carrying out publicity or running traffic driving campaigns.