We lost business last year in the run-up to Christmas because our shopping cart couldn’t cope with the traffic spike. How can we prevent this happening?
Ensuring your website hosting provider is ready for the upsurge in traffic is crucial to preventing your website from crashing.
Dominic Monkhouse, managing director of web hosting company Peer 1, says: “The hosting company is the engine behind a shopping cart. You need to make sure it can scale up quickly to meet demands in traffic and bandwidth. It will pull the data, push it to your payment processing provider and send it back to the customer.”
He adds: “Performance and speed relies on having the right network capability and the right firepower in your server hosting. Have the conversation with your hosting provider now to check it can scale up with traffic spikes and how much it will charge you for over-usage.”
Even when you plan ahead, online problems can still crop up over peak trading. Monkhouse believes the best course of action in this case is to get in touch with your hosting company as quickly as possible. “If your web hosting company hasn’t called you, call it immediately,” he says. “It will more than likely be aware of the problem and there will be people to fix it. Insist on a fixed timing for when it can get you back online, and ask if it will be issuing credit for the downtime.”
He concludes: “Website downtime is a disaster ahead of the Christmas period for etailers, but a responsible hosting service provider will have a compensation policy that protects your business and ensures it has its own incentive to avoid shoddy service delivery in the first place.”
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