A health system's site is unremarkable traffic until an outbreak, a closure or a local incident, and then it becomes the number everybody is looking for.
Most of the year it is a brochure. The rest of the time it is the primary channel for information people urgently need.
A regional health alert moves a site from hundreds of sessions to tens of thousands within an hour, and the announcement page is the one everybody lands on.
Find a doctor by specialty, location, language and insurance is a faceted query across thousands of records — the slowest page on most hospital sites.
Appointment requests and symptom triage forms carry health information. They bypass caching, are encrypted in transit and at rest, and are never logged in plain text.
Health information has to be usable on old devices, at large text sizes and by screen reader. Server-rendered pages and no layout-blocking scripts are the part a host controls.
A banner announcing a closed clinic is worthless if it is behind a ten-minute cache. Targeted purging makes urgent content live in seconds without dropping the whole cache.
The hard part is not capacity, it is a communications team getting an urgent notice live while the site is at its busiest.
Traffic arrives without warning and concentrates on one or two pages, which is the easiest surge to serve and the easiest to serve badly.
These differ from a standard WordPress site on the same plan, and each follows from a site that is quiet until the moment it is essential.
| Setting | What we do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Surge headroom | Provisioned continuously rather than requested when needed | A health alert produces its peak within the hour, so capacity that has to be asked for arrives after the period it was needed for has passed. |
| Provider directory queries | Backed by a search index rather than filtered in the database | Specialty, location, language and insurance filters combine into a query no ordinary index covers, and it is the page a patient is most likely to give up on. |
| Clinical and appointment forms | Cache-exempt, encrypted at rest, excluded from request logs | Health information entered into a form must not persist anywhere it was not intended, and default request logging captures exactly what it should not. |
| Urgent notice publishing | Targeted purge on the affected URLs only | Waiting out a cache window to announce a closure is unacceptable, and dropping the entire cache during a surge removes protection at the worst moment. |
| Asset delivery | Server-rendered HTML with no layout-blocking scripts | Health information is read on old phones and at large text sizes, where a client-rendered page degrades into a blank screen rather than into plainer text. |
Every plan includes free migration, daily backups, SSL and 24/7 support.
Free migration, surge capacity that is already there, and urgent notices live in seconds.