In the face of economic austerity, UK shoppers are expected to splash out a huge £8billion online this Christmas. With such impressive figures being touted by online retail body IMRG, it’s essential that businesses are taking the correct steps to avoid their websites dropping offline as hordes of shoppers rush to make last minute purchases.
As online becomes the fastest growth area for sales, using the power of cloud to cope with the spikes during Christmas trading periods will combat help combat site crashes that weren’t geared up for the sudden surge in traffic.
Damian Saunders of Citrix System recommends retailers access cloud services to scale to unlimited resource as soon as it’s required and drop back once traffic slows down afterwards. This flexible pay-as-you-go model is the best solution for sudden spikes of demand rather than to build the short term infrastructure in-house. And consider alternative short term hosting solutions to cope with higher levels of security for online transactions.
Here we offer up our top tips for keeping your website up and running this Christmas – and recommend acting now. If you want more advice on this please contact us direct on: jp@fusionunlimited.co.uk
A full audit of your infrastructure will ensure your network connections are properly sized to handle a high influx of web traffic.
A readiness load test 6-8 weeks in advance will test the capacity of your site and add additional hardware capacity changes if necessary
If possible, simulate different types of failures in a development environment before the live date. The best way to handle failure is to practise failing
Work with your support team to make sure multiple web servers are up and running during high traffic times, which will ensure your site stays up during critical high-traffic times
Look at your average daily traffic volume, analyse any downtime you had and correlate it to the
cause. Begin working on a plan to remedy it for next year
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