Handling enrollment traffic spikes on Cascade sites

Every institution has a handful of days when the website matters more than any other time of year: the application deadline, decision day, the morning registration opens, the first week of term. Add the unplanned ones, such as a weather closure or a campus emergency, when thousands of people refresh the same page at once. A Cascade site starts with an advantage on those days, because static pages are cheap to serve. The spikes that cause trouble are almost always in the parts around the static pages.

Where the load actually goes

The publish-during-peak trap

Here is the scenario that catches most teams. Decisions go out at noon. Traffic climbs. At 12:15 someone notices a typo on the decision page and publishes a fix. The publish invalidates that page across the CDN, and the next request from every edge location goes to the origin at the same moment, while traffic is at its highest. On a well-built platform this is a short blip. On an undersized one it is the moment the site slows to a crawl.

The answer is not to avoid fixing typos. It is to publish narrowly during peaks (the page, not the folder), to avoid Publish All jobs on peak days entirely, and to have the hosting side re-warm important pages right after invalidation.

Why reactive autoscaling is not enough

Autoscaling adds capacity when metrics show load rising. That works for gradual growth. A deadline-day spike can go from normal to many times normal in minutes, and new capacity takes a few minutes to come online. For spikes you can predict, capacity should already be there. For the ones you cannot, such as emergencies, the CDN and a lightweight emergency page carry the load while autoscaling catches up.

A peak-season plan

1. Share the calendar. Give your hosting team the dates for deadlines, decision releases, registration, orientation, and major campaigns at the start of each term.
2. Pre-scale for known peaks. Raise capacity ahead of each date rather than waiting for load to trigger it.
3. Load test before the season, with a realistic mix: cached pages, uncached pages, search, and form submissions, not only the homepage.
4. Freeze changes around peak days. Content updates continue; infrastructure and template changes wait.
5. Publish narrowly on peak days, and schedule any large publish for the evening before.
6. Keep an emergency page ready. A plain, fast page for closures and alerts, with minimal images and no third-party scripts, publishes quickly and survives any spike.
7. Watch the dependencies. If the application portal or payment system is run by another team, confirm their capacity plan too. Visitors blame the website either way.

How to tell if your site is struggling

Slow first byte on uncached pages, search taking several seconds, form submissions timing out, and a rising share of requests reaching the origin are the early signs. Visitors notice at the same time you do, so the time to act is before the date, not during it.

After the peak

Once the day is over, look back at the numbers while they are fresh: peak requests per minute, the slowest pages, cache hit ratio, and anything that alerted. Those figures are the best input for next year's plan, and they turn "it felt slow around noon" into something that can be fixed.

How eWay handles peak traffic

eWay designs Cascade Website Hosting for publish-driven and enrollment-driven spikes: auto-scaling tuned to real traffic, capacity raised ahead of known dates, CDN delivery that absorbs cached traffic, automated invalidation followed by cache warming for high-traffic pages, and separate scaling for dynamic services. Multi-AZ architecture is the floor for enrollment periods and emergency communications. Maintenance is never scheduled during registration or the start of term, and monitoring watches origin load and cache hit ratio throughout the peak so the on-call engineer sees trouble before visitors do.

What to include in a support ticket

• The severity you would assign, P1 to P4 (see severity levels and response times)
• Upcoming peak dates and times, as early as you know them
• Which pages or features you expect the most traffic on
• For an active slowdown: the URLs, the time, and whether cached pages or only dynamic features are slow

eWay customers can open a ticket in the support portal or email support@ewaycorp.com at any time. See how to request support for all the options. Related reading: CDN caching and cache invalidation and why a Publish All can slow down or fail. More at Cascade Website Hosting.