Every webmaster dreams of the day that they finally post that special article – the one that suddenly takes on a viral life of its own and pulls in the traffic like gangbusters. The really good ones follow this path and eventually wind up on a major website or online news organization.

When that happens, it’s supposed to be the most exciting day of your online career. Unfortunately, many site owners miss out on the feeding frenzy because their website simply can’t handle the traffic. People begin to have trouble accessing the site, frustrate, and click away to something else.

When that happens, how will you know? What can you do? Fortunately, you can take some precautions before your site crashes under the weight of all that new traffic.

Planning for Traffic Surges

If you’re just getting started, then it will likely take some time for your website content to circulate widely enough for a potentially viral piece to take flight. The more places your content and links to your site show up, the more chances people will stumble upon something great you’ve just written. If no one knows your website exists, then, that great piece may never see the light of day.

Once you’re established, have a reputation, and you’re becoming known for generating cutting-edge stuff, it’s time to think about taking some precautions. You need to have services on standby that can step in and handle any traffic surges that may slow down or temporarily disable your site.

For example, Amazon’s AWS (Amazon Web Services) Storage Gateway offers solutions for just such a crisis. The service allows webmasters to leverage Amazon EC2’s on-demand compute capacity to mirror data in case they need a boost of capacity during traffic surges. It may be worth considering if you have a site with a unique concept that seems to be catching on rather quickly. That’s a sign that you may become popular more quickly than you originally expected.

Website Monitoring Services

Now that we’ve talked about how to handle unexpected traffic surges after they’ve happened, let’s focus on how to monitor your website uptime. It’s important to watch for downed pages and slow load times consistently in order to prevent your site from missing out on a rush of new visitors. Think about it: a percentage of that traffic is almost guaranteed to convert to loyal readers if you keep setting the bar higher for your content quality. However, if you fail to accommodate for the initial traffic spike, you may just lose every one of those new visitors.

But who has the time to monitor their website’s uptime all day and night? Certainly not you if you’re busy creating all that great content. That’s why using an affordable website uptime monitoring service like SiteUptime is so vital. SiteUptime can curb your website downtime through its wildly popular free and advanced remote monitoring services. When your website goes down, you get an instantaneous notification via email or text so you can take action right away. That will give you the chance to correct problems instantaneously – before you lose all those precious new readers.