My site went viral, every post on facebook fan page overloads the server. Little help!

Greetings.

I run 100's of sites off of a few cheap VPS setups which does extremely well with revenue. Gradual, predictable growth across the board.

One site in question went viral and I now get 1.5 million (and growing fast) visitors per month (yesterday with 2 posts I hit 120,000 visits). I moved this site to its own "dedicated" vps 3 days ago but I am finding that even this single box cannot handle facebook post traffic. I am used to between 1000-10,000 visits per day

Here are some server stats:
CPU 1.13 GHZ
RAM 768 MB


When I post a link on facebook:


CPU 98.96%
Load Average 2.38, 2.05, 6.25

Without facebook I am running between 10% and 20% CPU

Facebook page has only 20,000 organic likes with 14,000 talking about it. about 200 new likes a day.

It is all white hat. I use google ads (No CPA etc affiliate links)


I probably need to get another VPS but I just moved this site, including private DNS. I am wondering if anyone knows the best options for me. I expect to get 2m+ visitors per month soon. But I also have doubled traffic every month

Should I just go dedicated? What is the best host for this type of setup?

Also, with respect I wish not to share my site. I just never experienced "viral" traffic. It was always gradual with SEO.
Site has pretty much text, photos and a forum. No streaming video etc.

Help in deciding what to move to please. You guys are always the most helpful.

Congratulation on your success, keep up the good work.

tompots said:

Congratulation on your success, keep up the good work.

Click to expand...

Really?

To the OP: you should get a dedicated server, or at least a smaller one.
Also you should try seohost.us, the owner is a member of this forum, i think he can help you
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/members/85772-portalweb.html

tompots said:

Congratulation on your success, keep up the good work.

Click to expand...

Thanks, but is there anything you could recommend? I really hate the price of dedicated. but as I go higher up in VPS, dedicated seems cheaper. I can probably handle this load for another week maybe.

What network connection does your vps have? I had similar situation year ago and problem was network connection that was not able to handle so many requests because it was shared with other users. I moved to dedicated machine with 2gigs/dedicated 100mbs line and site was working just great.

gergo2007 said:

Really?

To the OP: you should get a dedicated server, or at least a smaller one.
Also you should try seohost.us, the owner is a member of this forum, i think he can help you
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/members/85772-portalweb.html

Click to expand...

Thanks. The cheapest dedicated server I can see is 175$ a month with the following specs:
Intel Xeon E3-1220LV2 2.3GHz
4 GB DDR3 Memory

Two levels up for VPS is:
CPU 2.69 GHZ
RAM 1824 MB
@ 100$ a month
VPS are all duel core Intels.

I just moved, and my fans were already buzzing hard about the short downtime, headaches and the DNS change. FFS.

The server is tooo weak to handle traffic of that sort.. Move it to a real dedicated with massive power.. I have a dedicated server for my forum which is running on vb5(resource hog) but it works smooth as butter.. If you need to know where did I get it from.. Here's the link

http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackh...f-your-first-month-exclusive-coupons-bhw.html

Nitros said:

What network connection does your vps have? I had similar situation year ago and problem was network connection that was not able to handle so many requests because it was shared with other users. I moved to dedicated machine with 2gigs/dedicated 100mbs line and site was working just great.

Click to expand...

Good question it doesn't say in the help file just the gig limit which is 500 gigs. Currently I use about 180 gigs+ in http bandwidth. Ill contact support and see. Never thought it was a pipe issue

Play it large and smart. Hire a guy that REALLY understands how to PROPERLY host this monster and play it like it is going to continue to grow. I once took an offline business from $11,000 in monthly revenue to $800,000 + monthly in 14 months. The reason I made it work was that at $40,000 I knew I had a tiger by the tail and stopped worrying about pennies. I hired a demographer from MIT at $120 and hour (this was 20 years ago) hired two guys to do analysis when I had enough work for one (six weeks later one was not enough) I worried about very few things:
1) Nothing Breaking;
2) Nothing slowing the growth;
3) Not getting enough rest;
4) Not seeing the big picture.

I told my bookeeper never to bother me with any issue or dispute under $200 ... just pay it. I told my staff that 35% of our gross went to advetising expense and no other expense except payroll was even 5% so I want ALL (not some) of the focus to be on making sure we got value there and that we didn't miss any big opportunities. I started our morning meeting everyday by telling everyone that if they wasted even 30 seconds of our 30 minute meetring talking paper clip crap they would be unemplyed before the meeting ended.

Small needs to be played tight. Large needs to be play loose and right.

And ... lol. I met a woman who was on Oprah twice and because she never spent enough to handle the flow made peanuts and not the real money that was there. Two shots on Oprah when she is plugging you can be worth morth than $200,000 in an ad buy

That is what I needed. I don't see those numbers with this one specific site and the site itself does not sell. It is just an informational site. I make about 3000$ a month in Google ad revenue from said site (not that much from the traffic but every penny counts).

You have a point, I might as well just bring out the big guns and hope for the best. People have been posting and pm'ing me other dedicated box providers and I would be paying so much less if I jumped from hostgator. (they have always been really good to me and I never experienced anything like this)

Overall it is a good thing, but I stress everytime I make a facebook post.

slybear said:

Play it large and smart. Hire a guy that REALLY understands how to PROPERLY host this monster and play it like it is going to continue to grow. I once took an offline business from $11,000 in monthly revenue to $800,000 + monthly in 14 months. The reason I made it work was that at $40,000 I knew I had a tiger by the tail and stopped worrying about pennies. I hired a demographer from MIT at $120 and hour (this was 20 years ago) hired two guys to do analysis when I had enough work for one (six weeks later one was not enough) I worried about very few things:
1) Nothing Breaking;
2) Nothing slowing the growth;
3) Not getting enough rest;
4) Not seeing the big picture.

I told my bookeeper never to bother me with any issue or dispute under $200 ... just pay it. I told my staff that 35% of our gross went to advetising expense and no other expense except payroll was even 5% so I want ALL (not some) of the focus to be on making sure we got value there and that we didn't miss any big opportunities. I started our morning meeting everyday by telling everyone that if they wasted even 30 seconds of our 30 minute meetring talking paper clip crap they would be unemplyed before the meeting ended.

Small needs to be played tight. Large needs to be play loose and right.

Click to expand...

WordPress? Install a caching plugin

mrsix said:

WordPress? Install a caching plugin

Click to expand...

no, I never use software I find I get better SERP's when everything is my own templates. But using cacheing software like squidoo or whatever might work. I think the majority of helpers are saying dedicated. Now I just need to find a cheaper and reliable host

move it over to a cloud vps and I would suggest host for web.
they have good plans and their cs is amazing.. the other day my site went offline cuz of a wp database crash. all I had on me was my phone on me AMD I could not get to a PC, sent them an email asking for help And they fixed it for me free...

oh AnM with host for webs cloud your site will never crash. I got dossed with 10k hits a min.. on a 40$ plan AnM my site was fine e, just ran slow as fuck... also host for web did not kick me... (BTW if some formatting or words are of f it is cuz I am typing on a phone AMD my auto correct is messed up..)

Amazon cloud servers are good I hear but expensive

Congratulation! Hope you get more

Move to cloudflare, or get something like Amazon s3

I just got off the phone with hostgator and showed them live what happens when I make a post. They agree that I need dedicated and tried to sell me theirs but for the price it seems I can get better. I will shop around. I have about a week or so hopefully

If you're expecting to bank well from it, upgrade to a powerful dedicated server in advance.