Increased traffic in your blog is desirable right? You crave recognition but when the moment arrives when your articles get slashdotted and dugg, your server inevitably crashes. What your readers get is an error message saying that the website is unavailable. This story has happened a hundred times already such that a name for it was invented. The “Digg effect” has even caused dedicated web accounts to crash majestically.

The pages of most websites today, especially blogs and social networking sites, are generated dynamically using PHP and MySQL. Assembling dynamic content requires more server resources compared to pages based on flat HTML. Fortunately, there are ways to optimize your server so that it uses fewer resources such as:

1. Maintaining a cache of recently created content. Generation of dynamic content is a long process involving database queries and piecing query results with HTML and CSS. If a cache is enabled, what the server passes on to the browser when the same URL is accessed is content consisting of readily accessible HTML. This is good because aside from faster response times when serving HTML pages, server resources are not used to put together dynamic content.
2. Optimizing the design of database tables as well as creating more efficient queries thus lessening the demand on your server’s resources when generating dynamic content. Make sure to index table fields that are used as foreign keys as well as those fields that are part of joins and used in forming query criteria.
3. Making appropriately sized images and using the most acceptable JPEG compression is another effective way of lessening the demand on your server’s resources. If you use images as plain-colored backgrounds, CSS can do this task for you without the cost of reading an image file and positioning it somewhere on your web page. CSS can also tile images such that there is no need to use one huge image to serve as backdrop to your web page
4. Using compression to reduce the size of data transmitted between the server and the reader

Preventing your site from crashing because of traffic surges is actually doable and is being practiced by experienced bloggers and site administrators. As you may have read, some of the tips mentioned are very simple like enabling the cache while others may require more experienced hands such as query optimization.

So the next time your site crashes the tips on this articles might help you solve this problem. If not help is readily available on the web.