HELP, My site have more than 40k visits by day and the server is down, I do not want all this visits...

[lans2787]

Hello...

I have a website for a local spa in ecuador, this website have a  blog with some tips about health... and suddenly one of the articles goes viral on south america profiels on FB and I am receiving 40k visits by day from other countries that are not interested to me because my site is for a local bussines in ecuador...

I already block some countries by IP , but Im still receiving visits from other south america countries, for this reason My hosting server company put down my website and I can not put it back online beacuse this thousands of visits use more than the 25% of the CPU of the server and the hosting company put down my website again...

I really need to know what to do, I do not want to pay for a expensive special server because all this visits from other countries are not interesting to me .and as I said before my bussines is local.

[Alex-Harford]

I like that idea but I'd consider alternatives to Facebook and 302 temporary redirect the article. When the traffic decreases I'd want to remove the redirect so all of those links and shares benefit my own website, and not another website.

[MattAntonino]

It may be too late to help you but in case someone else has a similar problem:

1. Repost the article (or much of it) on Facebook.

2. 301 redirect your viral post to the new post.  Images, post, content, etc. won't load at all - visitors will be directed to a server that can handle the load.

Also, by directing to your FB page, you may have more likes, more shares and definitely more fans by the end of it.

[ClaudioHeilborn]

To see incoming links,

1. Google Webmaster Tools?

2. Also if 1) you can use www.majesticseo.com (you need to approve via GWMT so that it shows all the necessary data

3. and of course you can use opensiteexplorer.org

But, and this is a great but, Facebook, linkedin and twitter will not show you lower level links, just a general link facebook.com/ or linkedin.com/ this will only help you identify the media not the post...

You will just see in your analytics as Alex said in  "social referrals" so then to know exactly which facebook post was THE ONE which brought you traffic you should have previously, now late for past traffic but still possible for the actual one, introduced tags in your posts so as to know it came from this specific one. There is a nice post about this in Ana´s Kravitz,(like lenny but not her sister... she did an amazing work on this and is very easy to DIY.

Unfortunately if you do not suspect from which post this specific and unusual traffic could have come... then, there is very little to do about the past IMHO, maybe sombody else could give you another hint... but I doubt it. Only to be tidy enough to tag every single new post that you make and track it on analytics as Alex said.

Here the link from Ana´s blog, good luck and if you need any further help do not hesitate to ring my bell.

http://www.akravitz.com/tag-track-social-media-traffic-for-google-analytics/

Cheers from a cloudy (once in a very long while) day in usually sunny Southern Spain.

[Alex-Harford]

I often find searching for the URL directly on Twitter and the Facebook public posts search is the best way to find out.

If you use Google Analytics you could go Acquisition > All Referrals and click on e.g. facebook.com to see a list of referring URLs. "/" (the homepage) will probably be most of the referrals but there might be some group or page URLs in there. Acquisition > Social > Network Referrals is another route.

[lans2787]

Thank to everybody for comments and help, I will use this cloudfare to see if works for me...I will try to work with the images too and put some adsense

I was seriusly thinking to move my site to wordpress.com , but If I do that I could loose severals plugins and benefits of this cms

Someone know how to track the original post on fb or twitter that make all this viral stuff?

Im using socialmentions and fresh web explorer to find people talking about my website but I can not find the original one that did this viral, I would like to know how all this happen? I think it can be a valuable information for all of us...

[EGOL]

I just want to say....  "Nice work!"  on creating some content that went viral.

Here is something to think about for the future....

If you are receiving lots of traffic from other countries on a regular basis you could use Google's Double Click Ad Server to display income-producing ads to visitors from countries outside of Ecuador.    You simply create a dedicated space on each of your pages where the ad will be displayed.  When a visitor from Ecuador arrives that person will see an ad for one of your Spa products.  When a person from outside of Ecuador arrives that person will see an adsense ad.

Just typing this has given me an idea on how I can profit from this on one of my sites.  The reward of commenting on forums.

Good luck!

[ClaudioHeilborn]

Hola Jonathan!

If all those visits are real (and you are not being hacked) I would be definitely happy, (as a matter of fact much more than happy) and prepared to jump from this hosting to a much more powerful one, even if you have to invest on doing so. That sort of viral effect is something we marketers are searching as the holy grail in the crusades… you shouldn’t reject it, on the contrary you should make good use of it.

You will profit on SEO, look it this way, you would have to invest a huge amount of money to get this relevant traffic.

Build a strong SEO on your basic set of keywords around this post, and profit on this, it will have a huge impact and payback on SEO positioning. Even though your business is local you will profit on relevant, real and viral traffic into your site, wherever this traffic comes and specially if you could transform your blog in magnet for relevant keywords.

Relevant traffic (wherever they come from) will bring you positioning, and positioning (also in Ecuador) will bring you visits (from Ecuador) & that you can transform into more clients to your local store.

If you do not know how to do this, here in Moz you will find lots of friends that will try to help you doing so…

Hasta la vista!

Cheers from an incredibly nice Saturday winter morning in southern sunny, always sunny, Spain.

[ThompsonPaul]

Jonathan, there's no point wasting your time trying to optimise images at this point. Your images are such a tiny percentage of your server load right now that working on them will likely have no effect on whether your host will allow your site back online.

Your host is absolutely right - shared hosting is simply not capable of running php and serving requests for 40,000 visits a day for a WordPress site.

There is something that may help though! Your best chance is to ask your host to help you set up CloudFlare. (It may already be available to you if your hosting account uses the cPanel control panel.) CloudFlare is called a Content Delivery Network or CDN. What it does is take most of the content from your site and store it on hundreds of servers around the world. Then, when a visitor comes to your site, CloudFlare figures out which of it's servers is closest to the visitor, and supplies the files from there. So a huge amount of the work gets done by CloudFlare's servers instead of your own. Using it will typically reduce your server requests by 50-60%.

The basic version of CloudFlare is free. It's pretty straightforward to set up, but having some help from your host will make it easier. Once it's in place, it's quite possible (but unfortunately no guarantee) it will reduce your server load enough to keep your host happy.

Your only other alternative will be to block a whole more of the unwanted countries, or upgrade to a stronger server.

If you have any questions, be sure to ask!

Paul

P.S. One other thing that can really help temporarily, even with CloudFlare, is to turn off comments on the posts that are getting the most traffic, assuming there are comments at all.

[lans2787]

I will try to get access to my cpanel account  again and try to do it...

This is what the hosting company says:
Nevertheless, after checking the apache access logs for divaestetica.com.ec during the hour preceding the last automated CPU block that this account triggered, I observed 111997 total http requests from 2685 unique IP addresses. This is quite a bit of traffic for a Wordpress site to handle by itself on a shared server.

[KeriMorgret]

Have your images been optimized for the web? Perhaps with the smush.it plugin? Making sure that if it's a fairly simple image it's only taking up 20k and not 100k. Perhaps there are images on the page getting all the traffic that make for a nice header, but you could remove or replace with an image that's a smaller file size? Are there widgets loading facebook and twitter information that could be temporarily disabled?

The links I sent also have some suggestions for situations like this.

[lans2787]

Hi Keri, thank for your answer...

Yes I am using wordpress, and I am already using super cache plug in for wordpress, I update for the last version of wp and last update of all plugins, also I blocked severals IP from some countries but I am still receiving visits from other places...

What do you mean with stripout extra images?

[KeriMorgret]

In case it is WordPress, here are a couple of posts about how to optimize the site for heavy traffic. Can you then go to your host and say that you've reduced the file sizes on images, are loading fewer items, etc. and then turn the website back on?

http://codex.wordpress.org/High_Traffic_Tips_For_WordPress

http://wpengine.com/2012/02/22/how-to-prepare-wordpress-for-an-onslaught-of-traffic/

http://speed.wpengine.com/ (for when the site is enabled)

[KeriMorgret]

Is your website on Wordpress or another CMS? If so, is there any caching plugin you can use? Can you strip out any extra images temporarily until your traffic dies down, to help reduce your bandwidth being used?