Every so often people ask me how they can ensure their servers can handle traffic and that their members would be able to gain access to their online membership sites without trouble. It is amazing that these people do not own a membership site in their whole lives, some have never made a sale in their lifetime and yet, they are already worried about traffic. From this one can decipher that these are some sort of roadblocks one may be putting in front of oneself to procrastinate. I host a number of sites, with each having 20-50 people at any given moment, and my server does not act up, as it handles the traffic.
Before you worry about your server handling the traffic, ensure that the site is up and running. A membership site can also be run on a shared account. One can choose to move the membership site to its individual server, if it is able to make some money at the end of the month, say a couple of a hundred dollars. For as low as a hundred dollars, you can an excellent server. This server will handle the traffic from thousands and thousands of subscribers, even without fancy software, all one is required to do is to avoid clustering. On top of this, WordPress blogs enjoy caching add-ons like a built-in Cache add-on, and a Super Cache add-on. This generates a page on order and saves it for future use, so that it doesn’t recreate the same WordPress page recurring.
WordPress comes with built-in components, which keep the load down for your computer, even though computers are normally fast and in most instances do not need a dedicated server, but it doesn’t hurt if you are making the money and have a lot of online traffic, to acquire a dedicated server.
It is advisable to manage your membership site traffic by dripping the information they are after. By dripping the data, you will keep people coming back for more as opposed to if you did not, they would access your site, download all the content they need, even if it runs in to gigabytes and go for good. This might overwhelm your site, and cause inconvenience to other subscribers.
Dripping enables the administrator control the member site traffic and manage it. Have your site up and running and worry about traffic and shared account change, later, when the site is earning you $ 500 monthly or more. If it poses a threat, you can use cache add-ons as an alternative to store pages and posts made by WordPress, until later and drip the data still. Restrict the downloadable data to avoid congestion as people might start accessing data that runs in to gigabytes at the same time.
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