A number of high-profile websites have failed when there has been a surge of traffic- with the Olympics and UCAS websites failing most recently. Andreas Edler, managing director of Hostway UK, looks at how such outages can lose sales and deter customers from coming back to the site – especially if it fails during a payment process – and goes on to advise how businesses can handle traffic at peak times to prevent outages.
Recent figures from comScore revealed that British people spend more time browsing the web than people in other parts of Europe. They spent on average 35.6 hours online in December 2011, compared to European the average of just 27.5 hours. For UK online businesses, this trend is a positive sign that points to more traffic visiting their sites. But, how prepared are today’s websites for this increase in online traffic, particularly when there are spikes in demand?
You only have to look at large-scale failures such as the London Olympics 2012 ticketing site to see that many websites are still falling at the first hurdle when it comes to optimising their sites for increased traffic. But this doesn’t stop with ticketing sites. When Direct Gov launched the e-petitions website last August, it didn’t anticipate the rush of people going online to register proposals and subsequently failed to provide adequate capacity to cope with demand. Unfortunately, while it may seem obvious to ensure there is sufficient supporting IT infrastructure and resources in place ahead of any new launch or promotion, it is still often overlooked by many organisations.
Bandwidth barriers
In this day and age, these problems just shouldn’t be happening. With the right technology, any website should be robust enough to handle sharp spikes in traffic. All it requires is better planning from the digital marketing and IT teams. Central to this is making sure that there is enough bandwidth available to cope with demand. The challenge is that it can be difficult to estimate how many people will want to access a website initially – no matter how much market research is carried out prior to any launch or promotion. This means that if the initial demand exceeds expectations, websites can start to buckle or even be rendered unavailable, which can tarnish your brand. To help with this, a “pay for capacity” model can allow marketers and developers to purchase capacity and bandwidth as it goes along, making it easier and more cost effective to scale the technology alongside the growth of the business and the scale of the marketing campaign.
Tackling traffic management
Also, it is now feasible for organisations to prioritise traffic coming into their sites using traffic shaping techniques. ‘Traffic shaping’ allows marketers to offer a two-tier experience that users will be unaware of, but that will benefit them by helping to deal with high volumes of traffic. Using this system, preferential treatment can be given to ‘premium’ visitors. For example, if many visitors try to reach a particular web page at the same time, they can be profiled so that clients or regular customers will get a preferential connection before browsing customers.
For those that don’t like the idea of traffic shaping, there are other options to help ensure the online user experience is the best it can be. The first is traditional load balancing; where websites are hosted over two or more servers and traffic is spread across them. ‘Intelligent’ load balancing goes one step further, allowing organisations to route traffic based on the visitor type or on their own pre-chosen criteria. These technologies will help balance the load when spikes of traffic are expected, while optimising the visitor’s web experience.
Securing success
In order to prevent a launch from turning into a disaster, developers and marketers need to learn from mistakes of the past to ensure that they have the right infrastructure in place before they go live. Only by making certain that they have enough bandwidth in place along with other traffic shaping techniques can marketers ensure they have a successful launch that builds a positive reputation.
By Andreas Edler
Managing director
Hostway UK
www.hostway.co.uk
