Adding a referrer specific redirect to your .htaccess file

Have you ever had one of those days when you receive so much traffic from a particular site that you need to redirect that traffic to a cached copy of your content? If you can gain access to your .htaccess file than you can implement this very quick bit of code

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (example.com) [NC]
RewriteRule myarticle.html http://www.cacheserver.com/myarticle.html  [R,L,NC]
</IfModule>

The above short code snippet will allow you to send all traffic that comes from example.com looking for myarticle.html to the alternate location of cacheserver.com/myarticle.html. This little bit of code can come in very handy when a particular social media site is sending a ton of traffic to your MySQL/PHP site causing it to crash.

You do not even need to send it to another server. If you simply create a static page on your existing server (I like to use a cache directory) you can send the traffic there. In all honesty it is far better to serve the cached copy from your own server than to send it elsewhere.