Member Article

Five Tips For Eliminating Website Bottlenecks

Today, we’re going to start out with a story. You’re managing a website that is enjoying a boom in traffic; there have never been this many visitors at one time. Suddenly, things come grinding to a halt. It starts with slow load times on the website. Next, its performance degrades until it’s nearly inaccessible. Eventually, it crashes – and all those users who might have visited end up having to go elsewhere.

It’s every webmaster’s worst nightmare: a bottleneck has crippled your site.

Bottlenecks are potentially present in pretty much every system gree – they’re both inevitable and unavoidable. Your web hosting company or cloud provider will take care of ironing out any hardware kinks. But, as a webmaster, it’s up to you to manage the software side - a badly-coded application can bring things grinding to a halt just as surely as anything else.

To that end, there are a few things you can do:

Monitor Your Website And Prepare For Trouble

Always be aware of how your site is doing – and when it’s experiencing a particularly heavy load. By and large, this is the most important piece of advice I can possibly give you. If you don’t keep a close eye on your site’s performance, you aren’t going to be able to nail down and rid yourself of potential bottlenecks. Thankfully, most hosts offer some form of monitoring software (or at the very least, support it).

Balance Your Server Loads

When a website’s traffic becomes too much for it to handle, it’s usually some component of the hardware that ends up bottlenecking everything else. Because of this, load balancing software is a must for high-traffic sites. Thankfully, Datarealm offers automatic load balancing, so this isn’t really something you’ll need to worry about with us.

Keep Your Hardware Up To Date

In a lot of colocated hosting installations, it falls to the client to keep their servers up to date, given that the vast majority of bottlenecks actually tend to be hardware-related. This means that failing, outdated, or low-grade hardware is more or less guaranteed to cause problems for you. Thankfully, this isn’t something you have to worry about with Datarealm.

Check Your Applications For Resource Hogs

Although most bottlenecks tend to be hardware related, not all of them are. A poorly-coded application can cause an entire system to come crashing down. Keep an eye out for memory leaks, and be careful which applications you install.

Make Sure You’ve Got Proper Security Software

Performance issues might not always be related to any of your own hardware or software. Malicious software can just as easily create a performance problem (in addition to all the other issues it can cause). It’s thus imperative that you take the necessary steps to keep your website secure.

Bonus: Stress-Test Before Going Live

Last but certainly not least, why not perform a stress test or two before new website components go live? Although not all hosts provide it, some will allow you to set up sandboxed instances in order to test new software or hardware.

About John- John Mack is a technical writer for Datarealm, one of the oldest web hosting companies. You can follow Datarealm on Twitter, @datarealm, Like them on Facebook, and check out more of their web hosting articles on their blog, http://www.datarealm.com/blog.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by John Mack .