Can my reseller host really not handle the traffic?

[eljefe3]

So I've been working with a heavy duty email marketing guy, yet not seeing results that he was talking about. He now says he knows why and that is he is flooding my server with too much traffic and it's not getting in. He's got a stack of 250 servers in colo and has a 10gbps pipe.

Does this sound feasible that the traffic he is sending is just making my host think this is a ddos and traffic just simply isn't getting through.  On a tangent, he said he sent traffic to a youtube video and it got 1.3 million views in 24 hours.

I know we have some hardware/tech guys here, but unfortunately I'm not one of them.

[Rooftop]

So he is suggesting either that it's flooding the server or the server is blocking it.

It could overwhelm the server without it actually taking it offline.  If, for instance, you are serving database pages it could slow the database server to a crawl without ever taking things totally offline (which would presumably trigger some sort of alert to you).  You should still see a good spike in traffic on the server though - even if client side tracking like GA doesn't kick in.

You could try having a simple landing page as a test - with as few requests on it as possible.

You *could* feasiblly have a firewall that is blocking it due to a sudden spike.  Seems off though. Talk to the host. They will be able to tell you whether that is the case and whether traffic was being blocked at the time.

On a tangent, he said he sent traffic to a youtube video and it got 1.3 million views in 24 hours.

Well, he could say anything!  
Caveat : I'm not really a hardware guy either, but I do seem have been running too many servers for too long

[Gurtie]

>> 1.3 million views

yeah. Entirely possible I'm guessing. But.... I keep seeing invoices to one client from a supplier who reports they deliver a huge number of video views on various campaigns. I can't actually track the number of video views or how far through they view because I don't have access to the data - but I can see that there is very little traffic driven and absolutely no conversions with any connection to that traffic.

But, it could be they're converting on brand searches. Or it could be that for some people the aim is the view, not any further action, in which case it could be money well spent.

[ergophobe]

I know for my wife's site, they dribble out emails (I forget how many at a time) because if they don't, it slows down servers and, in their case, overwhelms call centers. So they send emails out on a rolling distribution over a couple of days to even out the extra volume.

[jetboy]

1. I've used a lot of big third-party email list players over the years, and seen minimal sales. Some produced lots of enquiries that didn't convert though. Needless to say, all came with a stack of success stories with other companies.

2. I'm not saying it can't happen, but DOS from email traffic seems unlikely. The traffic is dependent on individuals clicking through, and this would be mostly spread over a number of hours after the send.

3. What can take down servers very easily is if the images on the emails are hosted on your own servers. This will cause a spike, using up bandwidth and Apache processes. In this scenario, web page response times will go sky high.

4. Is there any reason that the email guy can't phase the send over a number of hours or days if you think you're hitting resource limits? (as ergophobe says)

5. A free server analytics tool such as Munin is invaluable. You'll be able to see if any aspect of your stack is hitting its limits. I've put a set of graphs from a lightly used server at http://www.jetboy.co.uk/img/munin.jpg for you so you can see the sort of data you can get.

[eljefe3]

Thanks everyone.  Good information and what I'm going to do is move a domain over to his stack that can handle the traffic and call him out on it. Conversion ratio was ok at 1% of uniques, there just wasn't near the amount of traffic that he claims is normally sent.  I too asked about throttling back and he said that is was throttled back. 

Talking to a sys admin at another host, he said to use something like cloudflare with a cdn ( content delivery network).

[Rooftop]

We're using cloudflare on a couple of projects at the moment.  Definitely lightens the load by quite impressive amounts considering its ease and affordability.  Obviously the more dynamic the site needs to be the more the advantage is erroded,  but it is such an easy win.