When months of planning have gone into preparing for a launch or for peak shopping season, no one wants their site to fall at the last hurdle.
The crucial step is having the right tools in place to support the demand, as Nigel Beighton, vice-president of technology at cloud provider Rackspace, explains. He says: “Getting ready for any peak period involves evaluating both your infrastructure and code to optimise for the best results.”
It’s important to thoroughly test your website before a busy period to highlight any problems and correct them beforehand.
Beighton says: “To find out whether you do have the right infrastructure in place, work with your supplier to conduct a readiness load test six to eight weeks in advance. This will test the capacity of your site by flooding it with a large volume and variety of requests, like landing on the home page and filling up the basket.
“From the results, you’ll be able to pinpoint any problems and make sure you have enough web server capacity to cope.”
Retailers need to ensure they have enough server space available to cope with increased demand, and Beighton says cloud technology can sometimes help because it can be scaled up as needed.
He says: “This scalability works both ways when business dies down again, servers can be bought back down to a more consistent level.”
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