Chapter 9. Dealing with Unexpected Traffic Spikes
THE FOCUS OF DEALNEWS.COM, and its sister sites, is to find great deals on consumer products and let our visitors know where to find those deals. We handwrite every deal on the site, and many of our visitors visit the site multiple times per day. In addition, we have tens of thousands of people following RSS feeds and signed up for email alerts and newsletters, all so that they can get the best deals on the wide variety of products we cover. Because we are focused on consumer shopping, the holiday season from late November through the end of December is our busiest time of year.
How It All Started
In 2006, we hired a public relations firm to help us get the word out about the bargains people could find for their holiday gift buying. This had a noticeable impact on traffic the week of Thanksgiving (November 17–24): we hit all-time highs in every metric we tracked. We had added extra capacity in the summer, and everything went well. However, after sitting down and reviewing the statistics, we felt that our current infrastructure would not last another holiday season. Over the first few weeks of December, the web team talked about solutions. We had come up with a pretty solid plan to start implementing in preparation for the following year's big traffic rush. But that would be too late to handle traffic in the current holiday season.
Our content team had written a great article about when to buy HD TVs. The article proposed that ...
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