With so much online business to gain or lose over the festive season, it’s high time for online retailers (e-tailers) to ensure that site failure does not become a Christmas tradition. To prevent internet downtime from happening, cloud hosting provider Rackspace has put together some web hosting tips with vital preparations for e-tailers to undertake.
Tip 1 – Check and test capacity
To avoid website slowdown, e-tailers in particular should do a full audit of their web hosting environment to check if there is enough network connection and server space available to handle a high influx of web traffic. They should also ‘load’ test websites by flooding them with a large volume and variety of requests, from simpler tasks like landing on the home page to key word searches, filling up baskets and checking-out.
Tip 2 – Get support
Peak traffic demands over the Christmas shopping period and beyond will probably not happen during a 9 to 5 working day. The study found that 52 percent of respondents will be shopping in the evenings, and 65 percent will be online on Christmas day. Retailers need to have appropriate support to keep their website up and running whenever it’s needed, also outside normal working hours.
Tip 3 – Use a hybrid cloud
Testing may show that additional web capacity is required during high-traffic times. The public cloud is the ideal hosting environment for this as it offers unmatched scalability on a pay-as-you-go basis. Use it in combination with dedicated servers or private cloud in a ‘hybrid cloud’ to deliver optimal security, reliability and overall infrastructure performance.
Tip 4 – Keep improving
After peak season dies down, review the performance of your website, analyze any downtime or other performance issues, and use this to fix any issues and prevent web hosting failures from happening again.
About Rackspace
Headquartered in San Antonio, TX, Rackspace operates data centers on four continents. The company positions itself as a cloud hosting provider, leveraging a product portfolio that allows workloads to run where they perform best – whether on the public cloud, private cloud, dedicated servers, or a combination of platforms (hybrid).
