500,000 Visits From PPV Afiliate In One Day (DDOS) - Have Affiliate Use Squeeze Page? (17)
500,000 Visits From PPV Afiliate In One Day (DDOS) - Have Affiliate Use Squeeze Page?
Hi,
I'm working with an affiliate network and one of their affiliates started sending PPV traffic to my "landing page" at 30,000 visits a day; which was fine. However, I guess this affiliate scaled up and was driving 500,000 visits a day; which just killed my server...it almost felt like a DDOS attack. I have a pretty good server, but handling 500,000 visits in a day was just to much.
I started thinking about this and instead of my server taking the load hit on all this PPV traffic; I'm thinking of having my affiliate network request that their affiliates use their own "squeeze page" that then redirects to my "landing page".
Is this a normal request? I don't want to have my server suffer because these affiliates are directly sending traffic to my "landing page".
Thank you!
No because the affiliate is probably running it directly linked for a reason. It may not be profitable for him if he used a squeeze page. If the 500k visits per day are raking in money, you need to get a better server.
I've had this happen before where I've scaled up a direct linked campaign and their servers couldn't handle it. Not only did it just crash, but I got credited for all of the traffic that I lost because of their server crashing. They then got a better server running the next day that could handle the traffic.
Nothing is more annoying than a server that can't handle my traffic.
But again if the 500k clicks are only equaling a couple $$ then that could be an issue.
500k a day is not a lot of traffic for a decent dedicated configured correctly.
If you make decent money from this I would suggest just upgrading the server.
Thanks for the replies!
Yes, after my server crashed; I had a "system administrator" come in and he optimized my current server to handle this type of traffic. It runs a lot better now and he said based on my server specs it should be able to handle this type of traffic now.
I was getting leads; which is good, still to early to know the quality of these leads, but also this affiliate was only able to run 1 day before my server crashed and before I optimized the server. So I guess once my affiliate network pushes this offer out again to affiliates, I'll see what type of results I receive after a couple weeks of running.
Thanks!
Is your first website a html page or a php page? You could cache it and only let the further steps being interpreted by php. (ie. leveldb, memcached, redis).
Another option would be putting a load balancer in front and then having multiple servers and the requests are getting forwarded to the backend which hasnt to do a lot 
edit: You could use some load tools in order to check if your server can stand huge amount of clicks
Anytime I talk to someone that wants to send traffic to my offer I always discuss his traffic source in-depth. I do not care about specifics I only care about volume and if it comes in bursts. I have even setup dedicated offer pages for specific people to make sure I can handle the traffic spikes. Whatever estimate an affiliate gives me I multiple by 5 and make sure I am able to handle it tech wise.
Nothing will kill your rep faster than wasting an affiliates traffic,time and money due to a lack of proper planning. Im glad you got it sorted out 
Also good thing you are getting the traffic through a network because if you had to foot the cake bill yourself for this kind of setup....
Dude, read up on optimizing page load speed, thats' #1.
i think caurmen posted a great tutorial. And yes, 500k/day is nothing, any normal server should handle it well and if it doesnt - its not a proper setup to run this business.
Use nginx, I had the same problem, the server crashed at 200k visitors, after installing this plugin is flying.
Thanks for the replies, good info here!
nefig, do you have the URL link to caurmen's tutorial post?
waltermitty, what do you mean by setting up a dedicated offer page? Do you mean you get a new dedicated server just to host the offer page?
Yeah, the guy I hired did a great job optimizing my server; he did the following to my server. I guess this also partly my fault to; since my server was always able to handle my current traffic I didn't realize hoe much traffic these affiliates could bring in. So I feel more prepared now with the server optimized, but only time will tell once I start receiving traffic again from these affiliates.
1- upgraded the plesk to latest 11.5 version,
2- configured nginx with php-fpm for faster php serving,
3- optimized nginx for best performance (gzip compression, worker numbers etc.)
4- optimized apache for best performance (configured mod_deflate, caching and header expire settings etc.)
5- optimized mysql for best query caching.
6- upgraded to php 5.4.25
Thanks!
You could definitely benefit from a dedicated offer page that just serves via Nginx, no plesk/Apache/MySQL etc. but not really necessary if the server is capable to begin with.
However... How many leads was this affiliate generating? You're going out on quite a limb if you let some random affiliate throw e.g. 1000 leads/day at your product with no data on their lead quality. Could be shit > $1000's down the drain because you didn't have lead cap terms.
Affiliates will spot these opportunities and exploit the hell out of them by scaling.
Originally Posted by zeno
I think I'll be removing this affiliate from my offer. I'm running a DOI offer and out of 837 leads only 200 confirmed their email address. This isn't the quality of leads I was expecting from affiliates on this affiliate network.
It's still to early to tell, maybe these 200 confirmed leads will be good and convert to customers, but I'm not sure they will.
Thank you!
Well, PPV isn't exactly known for it's high quality traffic, especially not that which is direct linked. How much are you paying per lead? Paying SOI so you paid out for 837 leads? How much is your sale on the backend - i.e. how many of those 200 would need to convert to match what you paid out for the leads?
No, I only paid out 200 since I'm running DOI only. The other 637 never confirmed their email address so I don't have to pay those out.
It depends on the customer; based on what type of items they are purchasing and how often they ship, but I should be able to match what I paid out if I could get 7%-12% to convert over to customers.
Right, well up to you to make that happen ;D
If you're paying DOI then just need to be prepared to cope with all the traffic... as long as the leads back out it's going to be worth it. However, you should still consider lead caps e.g. 100/day if you haven't yet had any experience with monetising the affiliate traffic or the backend of this offer altogether.
As far as expected performance from a server goes: I recently set up a server for a non-affiliate project that was expecting huge traffic.
It was an 8Gb VPS with 3 cores - nothing special - running a split-test on landing pages.
We stopped tuning it when we'd verified it could cope with a sustained load of approximately 11,000,000 page views a day.
You can definitely get past 500,000 visitors a day without too much trouble! As Zeno says, try to cut down on the pages that use PHP / MySQL to start, as they'll be the resource hogs.
I sure hope that you explained to the affiliate about what happened to your server and apologizes to him and maybe
take other measures to make sure he understands that things are sorted now !
Otherwise it most likely looks to him that your offer isn't converting and he might not run your offer any more.
A lot of times we set it and forget it and when we check back we are just concerned if its converting or not ! I know what I would do
is switch offers or most of the time my offers were rotating and the numbers would have told me to scratch your offer...
So you might want to let him know if you do not want to lose him or her!
Just a thought...
Home > Paid Traffic Sources > POP / PPV / Redirect