

Ask HN: How can I estimate traffic for a future event? - bcater

I run a website that, to date, has had very low traffic, fewer than 1k uniques / day. I expect a Fortune 500 company to link to the site via their Facebook page within a day or two. How can I estimate how much traffic will be generated?<p>Thanks, all.
======
maxmcd
There's a few ways I've gone about doing this in the past:

\- Find out if they've ever done something similar in the past and see if you
can get performance numbers on that post.

\- Ask around and see if you can get some good Facebook click data numbers for
the type of post you expect to get. These vary greatly depending on the brand
but you can usually use engagement (comments and likes on individual posts) to
see if different user groups are going to perform similarly.

\- Do some basic back of the envelope math. Look at how many likes they have,
likes per post. What percentage are going to click on your link?

Your best bet is usually the first one. Similar campaigns on the same page are
going to offer you the best insight. Although, I've found that social media
tends to fail to meet my expectations time and time again in situations like
this. Depending on the company, you might not push that far past 1k/day.

Either way, good luck.

------
merinid
You can not accurately estimate how much network traffic will be generated.
There is nothing from stopping it from becoming immediately viral. Sites have
had hundreds of thousands of visitors increases daily. Be prepared. Host the
static on s3 etc... Engineer for it.

Varnish: <https://www.varnish-cache.org/> A decent primer.

Failover database servers? Auto scaling on amazon?

A Fortune 500 is a big deal. Don't worry. This is a good kind problem to be
having. Regardless, the exposure will continue and be referenceable which is
great for your site.

------
dholowiski
You can guess, maxmcd gave some suggestions, but you can't really estimate. My
web site has been shown on two national TV shows and I can tell you from
experience that so many variables come into play that you can't even estimate
the order of magnitude of traffic. With the cost of web servers as they are
now, just prepare for the biggest amount of traffic you can imagine, overkill
is better than under.

------
true_religion
Does facebook have activity monitors of any sort? Can you ask them how many
people visit the page directly or view their news feed items?

------
onlyup
Let us know how it goes! What's the website?

~~~
bcater
Thanks for your suggestions, all. Our traffic roughly doubled, which didn't
cause any strain on our infrastructure.

For the curious, the site is <http://betterific.com>, which was linked from
<http://facebook.com/arbys>, marking our first big partnership. After endless
market surveys about what your customers want, Betterific tells you why.

