Thank you in advance. Kindly ask you to please bare with me and assist me, first time using Cloudflare paid services. Basically i’d like your assistance to understand what i need from Cloudflare solutions.
Case Scenario: Small website with sudden traffic spikes due to ads
Facts:
Traffic from real people, no bots/attacks
Website is legit
Shared Hosting is stable and fast (neither cloud, nor cluster, just 1 origin server but please assume that you have the best case scenario)
How can i make sure that the traffic spikes won’t result in the website going down?
I have purchased and setup the Pro plan. Will i also need Argo? Will i also need the Load Balancing? I read both add-on pages but they weren’t able to help me understand if i need them or not. I understood that they are for larger setups of clusters or situations where different data centers or origin servers are being used.
Neither the Pro plan or Argo Smart Routing will help reduce load on your origin, which is presumably what caused your server to go down. Load Balancing requires that you have multiple origin servers. The only way to reduce load on a single server is to make sure Cloudflare is caching your content.
If your website is using WordPress, subscribing to APO will enable Cloudflare to more efficiently cache your pages. Otherwise, if your site is static, you will benefit from creating a Cache Rule to cache HTML. HTML is not cached by default as that would break dynamic websites.
You may also benefit from enabling Tiered Cache. This will help improve the cache hit ratio when your visitors are geographically diverse.
Finally, optimizing your website code or upgrading your hosting plan will also help ensure your website stays online during traffic spikes.