“Will you be ready when Kate Middleton gives your website a shout-out?”

Fashion retail site ReissOnline.com wasn’t. The designer made headlines recently when Kate Middleton wore one of their dresses for a photo shoot and the resulting traffic spike crashed their servers.

Traffic spikes like this one are a dream come true — but small business e-commerce sites are seldom adequately prepared when these opportunities arise. An April survey by Neustar found that 73% of sites aren’t ready for a 200% increase in traffic, and 93% aren’t ready for a 300% increase. So what can your business do to get ready?

Sun-protective fashion designer Mott50 asked themselves this very question as they prepared their website for the increased traffic that came with appearances on NBC’s “The Today Show” and ABC’s “The View.” The company turned to New York based web development and technology firm, Pixafy, experts at helping websites maintain functionality when traffic soars. Mott 50′s site functioned perfectly, and sales increased with the company’s new popularity. Here are four critical tips from Pixafy founder Uri Foox, that will help to make sure your business is ready for its big day:

1. Simulate a traffic spike.

If you are anticipating a spike in traffic, use load testing to simulate increased web activity and measure the functionality of your website. How does it perform? Through load testing you’ll be able to identify slowdowns yourself. Think of a highway. It can handle many cars, but not all at once. Web traffic works in the same way. Figure out which areas of your site you’ll have to change, and address the problems that your simulation reveals. By simulating, you’ll see where performance is strong, and where your code needs to be improved. Loadstorm is the service we use.

2. Set up a Content Distribution Network.

A CDN is made up of dozens of servers in various parts of the world; this network can speed the site up by offering content from a server closer to you. Putting files that don’t change (an image, or a CSS file for example) onto a CDN takes pressure off the server so it can do what it does best – serve up dynamic files that require its attention. Taking a greater load off your server by moving unchanging content to a CDN, means your site will be able to handle more people at a time. Maxcdn/amazon s3 & Cloudfront are great services that are cheap, and also easy to integrate and use.

3. Take pressure off your server.

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Small businesses will often move all of their services onto one server, sharing their web server and database server on one computer. This means that if any service (let’s say your database server in this example) starts acting up, it can take down your whole site. Distribute the workload and make your site safer. As an added bonus, you’ll typically see a great performance improvement by separating your services.

4. Fine tune your servers.

Make sure your hosting provider allows you to modify these services to best fit your traffic flow. Not being able to configure apache could result in traffic spikes that paralyze your site. You could also be hosted on a shared server where even after you’ve configured everything correctly a different site ends up taking down your own. Set up cloud computing over traditional dedicated servers/shared hosting solutions. With cloud computing, what used to cost $20,000 can be achieved for $3,000.

This guest post was contributed by Uri Foox who is the founder of Pixafy . He has over 15 years of web experience, starting with his forward-thinking creation of CGI For Me, the internet’s first website providing free-hosted scripts that allow users to add interactive elements to their site at the touch of a button.