Is your News Website Ready to Get Increased Traffic during Budget?

Cloud Server Hosting

Budget is here, just round the corner. Do you expect a heavy inflow of people coming to your news website to get their bit of budget news? Have you prepared your website to manage increased traffic on your site? If your website crashes on the day when budget is declared, you might lose the whole lot of traffic and also the revenue that you might get from there.

Why does website crash happens during important news days like budget?

On such day when something like budget is declared which touches the lives of each and every person, it is obvious for people to look for what’s going to happen to their finances and expenses in the coming year. It’s the time when people start searching for budget news and the after effects. Some of these searches might land them at your website, thanks to your efforts spent for creating useful news items regarding budget. But why on earth that may lead to a website crash?

If you own a website, you know very well that it is hosted on a server. Now when a server gets too many requests, like on the day of budget, it might queue up these requests in waiting lists. The server then serves all the requests on a first-come-first-serve basis. Your website slows down and it will take more time than usual to display the desired information which means your viewers may go away to other sites.

Further, a web server is allowed to queue up only a predetermined number and if the requests of new visitors increase beyond this number, the server totally stops accepting new requests. It then displays error message. This is what we call server crash due to traffic overload.

How can you prepare for heavy traffic on your news website during budget declaration?

If you have hosted your news website on a shared server, the other websites on that server and their traffic might slow down or crash your server. You should, thus, move away from a shared server to a dedicated server. However, if you don’t get that much high traffic all the year round and are switching to dedicated server only for few scattered days of the year, like the budget season, this might not be a cost effective solution. What to do then? You can move your website to a cloud server.

How can a cloud server bring benefits to your news website?

Cloud servers act as dedicated servers. Cloud hosting provides the flexibility of dedicated server at the cost of shared hosting. You can regulate all the resources on a cloud server. Also known as Virtual Private Servers, cloud hosting can be scaled up and down as per your needs. For example, during a time period like the days around budget declaration, you can increase the bandwidth only for those few days. This makes you save on cost apart from preventing your website from crashing down when more people visit your site.

Don’t let your dream of high traffic on your website convert into a nightmare! Act now to protect your news website from crashing down on the budget day. Move your website to a cloud server. 

How digital certificates work to make your website secure?

SSL Certificates

Digital certificates are a set of tools used for managing the authentication of different users visiting a particular website, where the identity details are recorded. Prior to the advent of digital certificates, in order to make a website accessible to a limited audience and authenticating incoming user traffic, the only way was to allot a unique username and password to the focused customers. Hence, the use of such digital certificates provided a more robust and efficient access control mechanism, along with many other merits over assigning username and password, whose misuse is a serious security loop hole.  

Introduction to an https certificate

At present, the entire information exchange and communications taking place on the internet are done on a standard protocol, called as the hyper text transfer protocol (http), which is one of the several types of digital certificates. The http protocol is functional at the highest layer of the Transmission Control Protocols and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) model and is actually a language that defines a format, according to which various web servers and web browsers communicate with each other. The basic http digital certificate is a clear text protocol that manages and transfer data to-and-fro across a particular network, which unfavorably makes them vulnerable to exploitation from unrestricted access.

The lack of privacy in http certificates made way for the arrival of an https certificate, which is nothing but http secure. These types of digital certificates offer enhanced security over http certificates and are ideal for use in the exchange of highly sensitive information, such as online identities, usernames, passwords and debit or credit card numbers, along with confidential corporate business secrets. The fundamental idea behind an security certificate is that they use multiple encryption levels, so as to keep the information transfer as discreet and secure as possible.

In line with the various information encryption methods, the https certificate gives a definition to the use of encryption keys, so as to ensure a smooth and secure data flow between web servers and web browsers in the network. It must be noted that every web server has its own public encryption key that can be made accessible to a particular user, in order to establish a safe and secure web connection.

The digital certificates come into the picture when an end user's web browser wishes to verify if the public key offered by the web server actually belongs to any individual or organisation, which claims itself to be a genuine source. Further, the websites are deemed secure and genuine, when they display their digital certificate to the visiting user on his/her web browser. These kinds of certificates can be availed from a highly trusted third party, called Certificate Authority (CA). The CA issues a digital certificate that is usually enough for verifying that the website source and ownership is nothing but genuine.