Planning for Your Website’s Growth
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It seems like the dream of every webmaster is to have incredibly popular websites that are stormed by visitors. However, this dream may turn into a nightmare if it happens too soon. Avoid the burdens of your site’s over-popularity by planning for its inevitable growth.

The most observable problem a fast-growing site can encounter is too much traffic. The problem with having more traffic than you can handle is that you actually have to pay for the bandwidth your visitors consume by viewing your site. Web hosts tend to charge more if you exceed your allocated bandwidth. Some of them even have hourly bandwidth limits that shut down your site if it gets visited ‘too much’. You wouldn’t want that happening, especially if getting more visitors is what you’ve always wanted.

You can avoid this problem by projecting your expected traffic and by reading the contract you have with your site host. Make sure you choose a contract you are comfortable with and that there are reasonable consequences for going over your data transfer limit. Be wary of hosts that offer unlimited bandwidth. Read the fine print and check your bills for any errors or inaccuracies.

Another problem that many new webmasters face is having too many individual pages on their site. Regularly updating your website can be a heavy chore because of this. Keep your site’s pages to a minimum, and try to have a site map or navigational bar in a centralized location. Using navigational frames can do this, or other simpler scripts that keep a navigation area in place. You can also structure your site in such a way that your users won’t get confused regardless of how many pages your site has.

Your website’s host also plays an important part in your transition from having an unknown site to a wildly popular one. It helps to have a hosting company that has good technical support that knows the servers and software like the back of their hand. After all, if your now-popular site was suddenly inaccessible for some reason, this would mean that you could permanently lose potential customers and visitors who found your site during its downtime. If you can’t afford a high-tech web host or a lot of allocated bandwidth when you’re merely starting, you can just research the market and make a list of web hosts you intend to use if your site suddenly becomes very popular. Be prepared to make the move anytime, because a reliable and dedicated web host may just make a difference on how commercial your site can be.

Other than bandwidth, security may also be an issue for a newly established website. Check reviews of your prospective web hosts to ensure that they are capable of troubleshooting and solving problems such as hacks, bugs, and hardware issues.

It’s important not to wait until your site becomes too popular to handle. Make plans while your site is still small, so that your inevitable growth can be a smooth, easy transition that you can look forward to.

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