Pages load in an instant, no lag anywhere, checkout goes smoothly, and your customers are happy with the service they get. But then Black Friday hits.
Some people will go out, turn into Neanderthals, and fight over TVs and PS5s from their tents. And others? They’ll wake up early and start online shopping.
Within seconds, your site is absolutely overloaded with traffic. Lagging, crashing, jammed customer service lines, orders getting stuck in the middle of checkout… Pure chaos.
If you’re not ready for this, you’ll lose money (and reputation).
The thing is, these kinds of traffic explosions don’t just happen around Christmas and Thanksgiving. Seasonal surges happen everywhere, all the time, depending on the latest TikTok trend, or depending on what a politician said just a few minutes ago – it can be anything. And if you can’t ride the wave, it wipes you out. Luck has nothing to do with this; it’s just a matter of being prepared and having the right tech.
And in this article, you’ll learn how to anticipate surges and, more importantly, how to survive them.
What Triggers Seasonal Spikes
Seasonal traffic spikes usually have a clear cause.
If it’s close to the holidays, of course, people will shop. Who wouldn’t with all the Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals, not to mention Christmas sales? But this isn’t the only time of the year when traffic spikes.
Weather can do the same, just in a different way. Take heatwaves, for instance. Who is going to cook during a heatwave?
People will start ordering food like it’s free, and delivery apps will go on the fritz if they weren’t prepared for this. Then there are global events like the World Cup or the release of a new hit show, where millions of people will want to stream at the same time.
Companies will try to get ahead of these, and they’ll dig through their own past data to see if there are patterns that repeat year after year. Suppose they spot a pattern, great. The problem is that history is not always enough, which is why you need predictive models and machine learning for things like weather. They can run countless scenarios and spot where surges are likely to happen.
Naturally, even the smartest models can miss if the only thing they can work with is user data.
If you have a platform (or app) that’s in need of more context, you’ll need a global weather API to give you real-world and real-time weather-related data points/signals that’ll improve predictions, making the whole model more accurate and useful.
How to Build a System That Can Handle a Rush
When thousands or even millions of people all want to use the same platform at the same time, you stay online only if you are prepared for it.
Here’s how to make that happen.
Scaling in the Cloud
Way back when, you’d prepare for a surge by buying enough servers to handle the busiest day of the year and then letting them sit idle for the rest of the time. Seems like a giant waste of money, right? Luckily, we now have cloud platforms, so there’s no need for this anymore.
Infrastructure is able to scale up or down in real time and add servers when traffic jumps. Once it goes down, the infrastructure follows. For business owners, it means a lot less money down the drain because you only pay for what you actually need.
Distributing the Load
Even if you have the most powerful server in the universe, it’ll collapse if every single request lands in the same place.
You can prevent this with load balancers. What they do is they spread all the incoming traffic across multiple servers. Think of this as opening new checkout lines in a store during a holiday rush.
No cashier gets overwhelmed; the line keeps moving—a win-win.
Even if the number of visitors doubles or triples, your platform can still keep working properly if you have smart balancing.
Speeding Up Access
There are many user requests, and not every single one of them needs to go all the way back to the original server. If you cache frequently requested information and use CDNs, you can serve up pages and files directly from servers that are (physically) closer to the user – lower latency (less lag).
This means that there’s way less lag happening, and the main infrastructure doesn’t get as strained.
Keeping Data Flowing
Do you know what’s behind every app and every site? A database. And if that database slows down, everything slows down. During seasonal surges, queries pile up and response times drag. That is, unless the system is able to handle them.
Replication (keeping copies of the database in multiple locations) and sharding (splitting data into smaller, faster pieces) will help things move.
The point is to make sure that information keeps flowing and doesn’t become the thing that’s clogging the system when demand goes up.
Conclusion
You can never anticipate 100% of surges.
Luckily, none of them are unbeatable, and all it takes to stay online is preparation. In fact, surges can be a great opportunity, and if your platform does well during spikes, you’ll earn more loyalty than you would on a normal day simply because you kept things moving while everything else collapsed.
