Tomorrow is 'Black Friday' — for online projects, this means that there will be peak loads on the website. Even giants can struggle with this, such as to Amazon on Prime Day in 2017.
We've decided to provide a few simple examples of working with a virtual server to avoid errors and not end up with people seeing a 503 page or worse, About:blank and ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT. Only one day remains to prepare.
Resource Scaling
A website typically consists of various modules — databases, web servers, caching systems. Each of these modules requires different types and amounts of resources. It is essential to conduct an analysis of the resource consumption volume in advance using stress tests and evaluate the disk I/O speed, CPU time, memory, and bandwidth of your site.
Stress tests will help identify bottlenecks in your system and scale them in advance. For example, you can enhance your server's power by increasing disk space during the promotional period, expand website bandwidth, or increase the RAM of the virtual server. After the promotion, everything can be reverted back as it was, done in your personal account without contacting technical support and taking just a few minutes, but it's better to do this in advance and during periods of minimal customer activity on the site.
Prepare in Advance Against DDoS Attacks
Websites during sale days go down not only due to the increase in customer traffic but also because of DDoS attacks. These can be orchestrated by ill-intentioned individuals looking to redirect your traffic to their phishing resources.
DDoS attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated every day. Hackers employ various methods, simultaneously using DDoS attacks and application vulnerability exploits. In most cases, attacks are accompanied by attempts to hack the site.
It's also important to prepare in advance and connect a DDoS-protected IP address to your server. At UltraVDS, we protect servers not just during an attack but continuously, effectively withstanding attacks of up to 1.5 Tbps! To safeguard servers from DDoS attacks, a series of filters connected to the internet channel with sufficient bandwidth are used. These filters sequentially analyze the incoming traffic, identifying anomalies and unusual network activity. The patterns of unusual traffic being analyzed include all known attack methods to date, including those executed through distributed botnets.
To connect a protected address to a virtual server, you must submit a request to the provider's support team in advance.
Speed up your website loading
During promotional periods, server load increases, causing images and product cards on websites to load slowly. Additionally, page loading is hampered by various frameworks, JS libraries, CSS modules, and so on. A potential client may leave the page without getting a response from the website, even if a more attractive offer exists than that of competitors. To check page loading speed, we recommend using Google DevTools.
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) can help speed up page loading. A CDN is a geographically distributed network consisting of caching nodes—points of presence—that can be located worldwide. When a client accesses the website, they receive static content not from your server but from the closest server in the CDN network. This reduces the distance between the server and client, resulting in faster data loading on the site.
You can set up a CDN network yourself if you have a VDS running Windows Server Core 2019, using the built-in tools provided by the operating system, such as Active Directory, DFS, IIS, WinAcme, and RSAT. You can also use ready-made solutions, for instance, a CDN from Cloudflare could solve the task much faster and cheaper. Additionally, this system offers extra features: DNS, HTML, CSS, and JS compression, and numerous points of presence.
Wishing you successful sales.
Black Friday at UltraVDS
We haven't overlooked the traditional discounts on this day and offer Habra users a promo code BlackFr with a 15% discount on all our virtual servers from November 28 to December 2 inclusive.
For example, the server on the UltraLight plan with 1 CPU core, 500MB of RAM, and 10GB of disk space running Windows Server Core 2019 can be purchased with the promo code BlackFr with an additional 30% discount for the year for only 55 rubles per month, bringing the total discount to 45% off the current price.
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Source: habr.com
