How to prepare for traffic?

Hi, grats on your new droplet and site. 50k page views is nothing to sneeze at but do you have any idea about the size of the traffic spikes?

50k views in one minute is a very different scaling issue to 50k views evenly distributed over the course of a few hours. It’s really about finding the right price and performance point for your “peak usage” vs total or average.

You could be proactive a couple ways:

1. Increase the size of your droplet. There is a way to resize a droplet’s CPU and RAM but not disk that will allow you make it bigger and then later, make it smaller. You only pay that increased price for the days that you use it.

https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/droplets/how-to/resize/

2. If this is within the scope of what you can accomplish, you can set up some local caching which should provide a very noticeable performance boost during peak usage provided that your content is not unique per visitor or constantly updated. An example of this is here:

https://stanislas.blog/2019/08/ghost-nginx-cache/

Finally, if you can do it, I suggest you try testing it out before you launch. There are 3rd party services that you can employ or software you can run locally to simulate varying amounts of web traffic. You start that load test and let it run then you could try browsing the site during the test to see what kind of impact the increased traffic load might be having.

Hope this helps, please don’t forget to back up your work before making any significant changes :D Let us know if you have more questions or feedback.