There are three things: Data. Opinions. Actions. The second one sucks - get rid of it.
Boom. Use data to identify when there has been a website traffic spike in the past. Then examine if something happened on that day that will happen again this year. Ramp up your server to reduce risk.
When the data shows that there's been a historical spike in web traffic on a particular day of the year, take action and scale up your web server. It's easy.
The first way of looking at this is in Google Analytics Audience Reports. It gives you all the information you need to go back, check stats and anticipate when the spikes may happen.
The second way is looking in your webhost panel. In this case, GoDaddy cPANEL (Linux) hosting is very popular, but they all have their own equivalents (WPEngine, BlueHost, HostGator, etc.). Go to your cPANEL admin, and find "metrics," then click "bandwidth."
If you see something EXTREME, or know that your website went down on a particular day last year, look at the usage in MB vs. GB on that day last year. As that day / event approaches this year, RAMP UP BABY!
Thanks for reading / watching - and have a great day!
Paul Hickey has created and grown businesses via digital strategy and internet marketing for more than 10 years. His sweet spot is using analytics to design and build websites and grow the audience and revenue of businesses via SEO/Blogging, Google Adwords, Bing Ads, Facebook and Instagram Ads, Social Media Content Marketing and Email Marketing. The part that he’s most passionate about is quantifying next marketing actions based on real data.
