Brittany Williams has been an Agathon client since 2017. At Instant Loss, she shares her weight loss story as well as real-life tips to help readers “conveniently cook your way to weight loss.”
Brittany’s also the author of three cookbooks. She’s been featured on a variety of media outlets, from The Kitchn and People magazine to Good Morning, America. Instant Loss sees an average of 300,000 pageviews a month but still fits comfortably on our base hosting plan.
A post goes viral and server errors
In July of this year, Brittany published a post about her thighplasty and posterior lift following extreme weight loss. That post brought a surge of traffic to the site, which caused it to load slowly and even throw errors for many of their visitors. A surge in visitors is a very good thing, but an overwhelmed site that won’t load for them isn’t.
Brittany emailed support. Because it was a Saturday and the situation was urgent, she also called our 24/7 emergency line. Peter was able to log in right away to look around. His goal was to figure out what was happening and the best way to move forward.
Identifying the issue and an immediate remedy
As part of his investigation, Peter added some additional visitor caching to help the site load better for visitors. He also identified several plugins that were hogging resources on the server as well as those that needed to be updated or removed entirely because of redundancy. He quickly outlined steps Brittany and her husband, Brady, could take to address those.
Finally, he suggested rebooting the server with additional temporary resources to help get the site through the surge of traffic until those things could be addressed. Although this required a 30-second reboot, it ensured the site had the resources it needed to consistently load properly.
Improving the site’s performance
Over the following week, Brady was able to clean up some of the plugins and settings that were contributing to the site’s slowdown. We worked with him to identify a quieter time on the site when we could downgrade the resources to their previous level to see if those would be sufficient after the clean up.
One more 30-second reboot, and sure enough, the site has been humming along.
Here at Agathon, we firmly believe you should only have to pay for the resources your site actually needs. When adding more resources is just a bandaid to temporarily cover up a deeper issue, we’ll tell you that and help you make a plan to address those issues. And when we advise clients to upgrade their resources permanently, you can trust it’s because they’re actually necessary!
In Brady’s words: when a post goes viral
After several months of using a webhost that would shut down our website (without notice) any time we approached our traffic limit, we decided to go with a much more flexible webhost. Enter Agathon.
After years of using Agathon, I can honestly say, they are the easiest webhost we’ve every dealt with. Their team is knowledgeable, quick to reply, and quick to action, but they are also courteous and kind. They work with us any time we have issues and are always willing to help out.
When a post of our’s went viral and our website performance started to suffer due to the surge in traffic, Agathon worked with us to make sure our server continued operating through the surge. They even beefed up our server resources as a courtesy to help us get through!
Their customer service is excellent and so are their prices. I can’t recommend them enough! If you want a webhost that will work with you and your website, go with Agathon!
Learn more about Agathon’s WordPress hosting
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With 10 years of experience as a professional blogger—and as a former Agathon hosting client herself—Mandi’s passionate about the good work Agathon does and sharing that message with more people.