It’s been a few years since MuskogeeNOW.com has had this problem, but increasing daily traffic to the site (and to MuskogeeMUGS.com) has overwhelmed the powerful servers on which we host these sites.
When there is too much traffic, the server stops responding and shuts down, even on the massive servers we use and with all the behind-the-scenes optimization we use to ensure the sites load quickly for all users.
When we reached 47,000 daily unique visitors several years ago, we assumed visitor levels would plateau at that number, since that’s very high for a hyper-local news site in a market with 40,000 residents inside the city limits. We were wrong. Viewership (counted by unique IP addresses hitting our sites in a 24-hour period, with only one hit per IP address counted as a “viewer”) has continued to increase steadily to the point that it’s shutting our servers down.
So we have today arranged with a third-party company to handle that traffic, caching our sites at their servers, only directing traffic to our servers if viewership overloads their servers first.
Other than in the next 24 hours, while the changes are disseminated throughout the Internet, you shouldn’t notice any difference, but if you do, please let us know.
