Plan for website success

If your website is about to get national coverage on a major television network at prime time, don't do something like this:

All those customers who are rushing to your site, and you just slapped a lock on the doors to say the site is down, come back later.

How many customers are you going to get with your doors closed? Yup, NONE. What percentage of impulse buyers are going to come back later? Good question.

Instead - if you KNOW it is going to happen, or think it just might, move to a server that can scale very quickly to your requirements, so when you know there's going to be a huge rush on, your site handles it all in it's stride, instead of failing miserably.

Amazon has a service called EC2 that is an elastic computing cloud - it adapts to your requirements. If things are going great, you can pay for more processing power to handle the larger load, and then scale back when things get back to some sort of normality.

Another provider of Cloud Hosting is GoGrid. If you know of any other good cloud hosting providers leave them in the comments.