Popular social news site Reddit crashed during an online Q&A discussion with President Barack Obama. In a thread featured in the site’s “ask me anything” area, viewers asked President Obama questions for about 30 minutes regarding the role of money in politics, the space program and support for small businesses.

Despite significant preparation work on the part of Reddit’s IT team, who added 60 or so extra dedicated servers before the event, the site crashed during the Q&A, as Reddit’s systems – its load balancers, in particular – were overwhelmed by hundreds of thousands of users.

The crash highlights just how difficult it can be – even for a site that knows to make preparations in advance for an event that’s going to have to deal with a heavy traffic spike – to keep a website online through a major influx of users. Web hosts – frequently the service providers behind these websites – are in a unique position to help customers better equip themselves for heavy traffic situations.

TJ Stein, technical support manager at hosting provider Media Temple points out that the crash was not a capacity issue, but the result of serving content for viewers who weren’t logged into the event.

“Serving dynamic content is really difficult,” says Stein. “For something like Reddit, where they’re dealing with lots of continents, it can be really difficult to get that real-time information out to viewers.”

There are a few technologies that web hosts can use to help their customers improve website optimization to prepare them for traffic surges, including front-end optimization and content delivery network services.

“Load balancing and CDN are definitely something that can help when serving real static content to a worldwide audience,” says Stein. “Offload assets from your servers, put them on servers you don’t have to manage. This way, you don’t have to worry about server strength and you don’t have the additional bandwidth cost.”

Reddit’s example illustrates on a large scale an issue that many smaller hosting customers face on a regular basis. And they may not have the wherewithal to properly plan for those situations themselves. And while an outage caused by overwhelmed network or server resources isn’t necessarily a hosting provider’s fault, it can definitely be a host’s problem, when angry or confused customers turn to their service providers for answers after their sites go down, turning a big accomplishment into a failure.

Web hosts should keep the lines of communication open with customers, says Stein, to better educate them on best practices and technologies they can use to ensure uptime during sudden spikes in traffic.

“Web hosts should speak with customers and give their personal touch to help customers scale up during peak times,” said Stein. “Web hosts can offer performance tips in terms of getting their static assets onto a CDN or recommend upgrading services. Their support team should help with looking at their applications and figuring out if there are any bottlenecks on their sites.”

Beyond just being a good partner, there’s a big opportunity for hosting providers to profit from providing value-added services to the kinds of customers who have to prepare for these kinds of traffic surges.

Offering a subscription-based, premium support service to customers is one way for a hosting provider to generate revenue while adding value to their offerings, and solidifying support for customers who need some extra help in building for things like traffic spikes. Services like these can also be a must-have feature for new customers who may be expecting big peaks in traffic.

Media Temple is in the process of launching several services around this kind of need, based on two different consumption models.

“We have two professional service products that are coming down the pipeline that are really value-add for our customers,” says Stein. “We’re starting to put more of our support efforts on premium services – a la carte services that perform administration and IT tasks. Beyond that, we want to do more subscription-based support for someone who needs a higher level of monitoring, 24/7 account managing care.”

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