Coping with occasional very high band width usage.

1 yearly peak!

[Tidal2]

I bought and put live a new domain name that I hope will do well generally. In August the site name is a location that hosts a major UK event with up to 150,000 physical visitors per day - if the weathers good anyway!

Currently I use a shared server for this and many of my other sites.

- My first thought is to move the site to another host (expensive for me) but at least it could not hurt my other sites if it goes down.

- Second thought is to put a more compressed graphic and narrow screen version online at the events peak times, it excludes somes photos too! I have this already online for dial-up users so easy to put in for everyone, not enough difference I think as its still moderately high in graphics.

- Third thought is I can view the usage during the event and perhaps put in an pure text apology page if it gets close to my band width limit.

The site went live in mid April and has had the quickest search engine pickup I have every seen, even had some Yahoo visitors already which is unusual so quickly in the UK.

Any comments welcome.

[Slade]

You can try offloading your images and other large items to a secondary site during the peak.

Amazon S3 might make the most sense as their biggest expense is for bandwidth used (with only a nominal charge for space used).

Note: I've not actually used their system yet, but considered it.

[Tidal2]

Thanks Slade thats a good idea, it would slow down the page load time but at least the site would stay on line.