Trouble Hosting High Traffic Page

8th February, 2010 - Posted by admin -

Hi Everyone,

I’m hoping I can tap the collective wisdom here because I really am in over my head at the moment. I have some limited hosted knowledge but have no idea how to host a high traffic web site.

I’ve had a particular page on one of my websites become popular. The page in question is very basic. It is made up of the following:
-> a static html file - 1.32KB
-> a JPEG image - 22.83KB
-> another JPEG image - 3.75KB

The page is receiving surges of traffic of up to 10,000 views per minute. It was hosted on a VPS but whenever the traffic surged the whole site would just start timing out. I upgraded to a dedicated server yesterday but am still experiencing the same problem. When the page is timing out the CPU and memory usage on the server doesn’t go above 20%.

The other complication is that it isn’t acceptable that the page just loads, I have to find a way that it will load and also load at a decent speed.

So, I’m trying to work out what to do next?

It has been suggested to me to host the images on the Amazon S3 service. Is this likely to help?

Obviously if I can make it work without purchasing more hosting that would be ideal. One thought I had was to redirect a percentage of the visitors (probably using a php redirect) from the dedicated server to a copy of the page on the VPS therefore sharing the load. Would this help?

Any thoughts, help, advice or guidance that anyone can provide would be greatly appreciated.

The specs of the two hosting services I currently have are:

LiquidWeb Dedicated
Linux - CentOS 5
Intel Q6600 Quad Core
4GB DDR SDRAM
250GB 7200RPM SATA / 8MB Cache