Server redirect query

[pauledwards]

Hi there, due to so much traffic coming through to our e-commerce site our host is going to do an apache re-direct for over flow traffic from www.mywebsite.com to a ww2.mywebsite.com

canonical tags will be in, but if there is a re-direct this is surely bad for seo, telling on onccasions the page has moved?

Any advice on this and the best way to re-direct users when there is too much traffic please let me know.

[AlanMosley]

My suggestion get a new host.

I work on windows servers  not Linux, but on windows you can load balance quite easily without the ww2 idea.

I also wonder about the too much traffic, I host at Azure and you can easily upgrade your server at the press of a button, but if the site is written well you would have to be very very busy to need to. Are you using a cms?

[Highland]

That seems like a really lame solution to your traffic problem. So much traffic we're going to mirror your website? That sounds like a recipe for disaster.

What we do is we have a load balancer sitting in front of virtual machines. If we need more capacity, we spin up a new instance and link it to the load balancer (we use Linux and a setup program called Chef). This is 100% transparent to the end users, including bots. No URL changes are necessary because the domains are pointed to the load balancer. We can have more capacity for our websites in less than an hour. This is more commonly called "cloud computing". Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, etc, all offer this kind of setup. The word you need to know here is scalability. Azure is a Microsoft cloud (as Alan said), so it only does Windows. AWS can do Windows and Linux.

If you're interested, here's the AWS page about their load balancers

[AlanMosley]

Azure does Linux also. Best set up a virtual machine and select an image, there are many to choose from, windows and Linux.

http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/