Schewanick Computer Services

When a company has a site they wish to host somewhere, especially small businesses with limited funds, they normally take advantage of special rates available from a hosting provider. There is nothing wrong with that, but it can cause some problems later due to the "budget" nature of the servers used.

What happens when your site has a sudden increase in traffic? Great for your business but not for your webserver. A high amount of traffic on a site increases the workload on the server, which means that it might take longer for people to download the site, and can, in a worst case scenario, crash your server, leaving visitors stranded. There are some ways though, to help decrease the amount of work your server has to do.

1. Decrease File Sizes
This is probably the easiest to implement. Obviously, the less data the server has to send, the less work it needs to do. If you have graphics that are 800x600 in size, and you only show them as 200x300 on the page, it would be better to decrease their size in an image editing program before using it on the site. You can also remove all unnecessary tag's and comments from web page code. Dreamweaver can actually do this for you at a click of a menu option. You can also download Absolute HTML Compressor to do it at www.download.com (its free).

2. Avoid dynamic pages
The next thing to consider is the use of dynamic pages (i.e. php, asp, xml, etc). When a user opens a dynamic page, the web server first has to process the dynamic page code, convert it into HTML, and then send it to the visitors browser (a browser has no idea what php code actually means, only HTML).

If you have pages that don't need to offer dynamic info, or don't need special server side processing, then make the page HTML. This will reduce the webservers load.

If some processing can be achieved using JavaScript, such as form validation, then use that. JavaScript is processed by a vistors computer, not by the webserver, reducing your servers work load even more.

3. Reuse
Everytime you reuse a graphic, instead of adding new ones on each page, the visitors computer, after the first viewing, loads the from its cache.

This is also true of CSS. Saving your CSS as an external file, as opposed to emedding CSS markup in each web page, means that after the server loads it the first time, the visitors computer will load it from then on everytime a new page is opened.

4. Reduce database queries
Webservers also have to process instructions by your dynamic code to access your database. Obviously then, the more you ask of your databases, the more work the server does. If you ensure that your database queries only ask for information that you will make use of, you can substantially reduce workloads. For example, SQL queries like "SELECT * FROM table_name" are the worst kind to send, especially if a table is made up of 20 fields and you will only be processing 3 of them. A query like "SELECT field1, field2, field3 FROM table_name" would then make more sense. Using WHERE in a query to limit the number of records returned also helps.

5. Other advantages
Using the above techniques will not only reduce your servers workload, but it also results in less webspace usage, less bandwidth usage and the pages themselves will be quicker to load anyway due to reductions in file sizes, and files loaded by the visitor's cache as opposed to from your server.

About the Author
Gareth McCumskey is the Managing Director for Nexus Interactive , a South African based company designed to allow businesses to make use of one IT provider for all their needs.