Something interesting happened on Saturday.
At around 8am, I published this blog post.
By 9am, I was experiencing a massive surge in traffic. To qualify that, the traffic was so heavy that I initially thought my site was under a DDoS attack.
But it wasn’t.
It was real people, visiting Jim’s Marketing Blog, in massive numbers… from Apple!
It turned out that the folks at Apple had decided to feature that post very prominently, in their Apple News app. So, for the next 24 hours, my work was being seen by wave after wave of people, who had never heard of me before. And it generated a record-breaking number of new client enquiries, for a weekend.
More importantly…
What does this mean for you and your business?
Business owners work hard to attract traffic to their sites. You may be one of them. If you are, how well prepared are you? What would actually happen, if your website or blog was featured in the news or went viral?
Well, if you’re like the vast majority of small business owners, within minutes, your site would become inaccessible! That’s because the typical hosting packages most people use, are not capable of handling the very success, they want their site to achieve.
Most basic hosting would grind to a halt if 100 people, let alone 1000’s of people, tried to use a site simultaneously. And with your site inaccessible, you’d lose all those prospective client enquiries or new readers.
Yes, the investment required for reliable, robust hosting is significantly higher. However, it means when your site hits the jackpot, you’ll be ready to reap the rewards. In short, if you’re serious about building a high traffic website or blog, invest accordingly.
Update: People have asked me what my hosting set up is. I have a dedicated server (Heart Internet), plus an additional service, which provides extra security and a way to deal with traffic surges (Sucuri).