A better way to serve seasonal traffic, insurance against downtime and the best chance of success for your campaign ROI… Here’s everything you need to know, plus how to get unmetered public cloud hosting to serve your 2013 holiday traffic spikes!
Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the Christmas shopping period are around the corner. For many ecommerce websites this is the period that determines the success or failure of 12 months of hard work. The National Retail Federation estimates that for many retailers the holiday period accounts for 20-40% of annual sales, and that it represented 19.3% of all annual retail sales in 2012 – an incredible $589.5 billion in revenue. In the case of Black Friday (and Cyber Monday, its online counterpart), these two days alone accounted for over $800 million in online sales in 2012. Don’t let downtime stop you from getting your slice of the action!
The lead up to the holiday period is an important time to make sure your hosting technology is up to date. That your website is ready to handle above average traffic in the most cost-effective way possible, and that it’s not going to let you down at a crucial moment. The Google search trends below highlight the potential for website traffic to peak to twice their normal levels, or even way beyond that when you consider how much of November’s peak can be attributed to just 48 hours of business over the Thanksgiving weekend. Thankfully there are a number of ways you can accommodate traffic spikes without permanently increasing capacity for the sake of just a few days of the year.
Don’t. Go. Down.
Your campaign landing pages are ready. Your email campaigns are primed. Your PPC budget is secured and your ads are ready to roll. But the best planning, content creation, design and communications will mean nothing but wasted efforts and money if your website goes offline during the holiday period.
With due planning and consideration you can build high availability into your website hosting at a variety of budgets. It’s a little like buying insurance. You need to look at the potential cost of downtime to understand how much money you could save by planning ahead, and how much you are prepared to pay for a solution.
Consider the situation of one hour of downtime. One hour of seasonal PPC budget at $1-$2 per click could easily burn through several thousand dollars. Your email campaign could cost you hard-earned subscribers rather than win you vital sales. One hour of peak-period sales revenue would be lost, for which it would take several hours to compensate during a regular sales period.
The cost of downtime varies greatly between websites, but to put things in perspective consider that the Standish Group calculated an average cost per minute of downtime for a point of sale website to equal $4,700 per minute, and (more for interest than by way of comparison) Amazon may have lost as much as $120,000 in a minute of downtime in the US & Canada this year.
You can put a rough estimate on how much downtime would cost you by considering the following direct costs for different periods of downtime (which is not to mention the intangible brand damage, lost repeat visits and sales, and staff morale). Consider:
Average revenue during the same holiday period last year
Marketing budget attributable to the period (including time and money spent on preparations)
Cost of stock unsold due to downtime
If you prefer to consider it from the revenue perspective, think about the benefit and expected revenue of a properly hosted website that can serve temporarily high volumes of traffic fast and reliably, and which is insured against hardware, network or application failure with a failover solution. Then think about what you are willing to pay to protect that revenue.
Use failover servers to keep your critical services alive
The first step in planning to avoid downtime is to choose an IaaS (infrastructure as a service) provider with redundant network connections and an excellent track record of keeping servers connected to the public internet.
After this critical infrastructure decision comes establishing an architecture to reduce the chance of downtime due to hardware or application failure. This involves implementing a failover architecture (server or servers) that can serve traffic should your primary services fail, along with a carefully considered plan for getting your primary architecture back up and running in the shortest possible delay. That means making sure the right people are available should the worst case scenario arrive (not always easy when there is turkey on the table).
When considering your budget for a failover architecture it’s important to remember that a full replication of your servers and databases (see below) is not the only solution available. Having assessed the situation, you may find that it is sufficient to build in a simple cloud server environment that is configured to handle a lower amount of traffic, to keep your seasonal landing pages going, or perhaps just keep your basket and order processing services up and running. All of these scenarios prevent a complete outage while you fix the problems, or aim to keep serving a certain segment of your users.
Although not a comprehensive solution, anyone who has suffered downtime during a peak period on which their annual sales depend will tell you that maintaining critical services is infinitely better than a complete outage, and in the example of maintaining the order process or customer service elements, it could help to save you from losing customers in the process of making a purchase. It’s all a question of risk analysis and management. Not putting all your eggs in one basket.
Guarantee 100% server availability with a High Availability Cluster
The belt and braces approach to high availability ecommerce hosting is a high availability cluster that consists of two duplicate hosting architectures – one primary set of services and one secondary set which act as a failover and/or serve some additional traffic. By using load balancing to share traffic between your two web servers you can double the traffic capacity of your website, as well as diverting all traffic to a functioning server in the event of hardware or application failure. Server monitoring means you know exactly when a problem occurs, but your website is still available while you or your hosting provider fixes the problem.
If you host your websites in your own data center, or even if your hosting provider has several data centers, you can host one set of services in a geographically distinct location in order to further minimize the risk of downtime should a catastrophic event hit one of the data centers (seems unlikely, but do you remember Hurricane Sandy?).
Use hybrid cloud hosting to serve traffic spikes more cost effectively
Hybrid hosting can be used to combine a fixed cost, dedicated hosting element for your base traffic, and a scalable, elastic, pay-per-use cloud hosting element to handle temporary traffic spikes.
Two fantastic features of cloud servers are their easy scalability (you can ramp up the RAM, CPU and Storage instantly), and their elasticity (effectively limitless traffic handling). This flexibility makes cloud servers conveniently conducive to a pay-per-use model, where the price you pay varies with the size of the server and the traffic served – a nice way to handle temporary increases in website traffic or application workload.
For all these benefits, cloud servers do however lack the power and capacity of high-performance dedicated servers, which may have a higher base price but can provide better value for high performance hosting and, importantly, fixed, dedicated resources and a fixed cost (as in the case of iWeb and many other hosting providers, the price of hardware includes unmetered traffic).
So both cloud and dedicated hosting have benefits for your ecommerce sites – dedicated servers provide high base capacity at costs that stay fixed, while cloud servers provide elastic traffic handling on a pay-as-you use (or more importantly, “don’t-pay-if-you-don’t-use”) model.
Wouldn’t it be nice for your Black Friday traffic spike, or your busy December or seasonal period if you could have both? With Hybrid Hosting, you can.
Hybrid hosting can be used in a variety of configurations to cherry-pick the best characteristics described above for each of your applications, services and traffic profiles of your hosting setup. That includes what we call a ‘burstable hybrid hosting‘ solution, where a high-power dedicated server is made-to-measure for your regular website traffic, and linked to Cloud Servers that are there to handle traffic spikes and busy periods. By only provisioning servers and paying for traffic during the short (but profitable) period when you need to, this is an extremely cost-efficient way to ensure a great user experience and website availability when your website traffic spikes during peak periods like Black Friday or Cyber Monday.
Save $1000s using unmetered bandwidth cloud servers
This a little tip for 2013 rather than a long term solution, but it could save you an enormous amount of money and ensure that your website is set up to handle holiday traffic.
As an introductory offer, iWeb Cloud Servers come with free bandwidth until 2014, so you can test the service and plan for traffic spikes while reducing the of a successful marketing campaign.
So whether you have a website you host in the cloud, separate landing pages to host, a seasonal microsite, or you are interested in trying a hybrid hosting scenario, you can benefit from completely free bandwidth (usually charged at $0.10 per GB) no matter how much traffic your campaigns and services generate.
At the very least, back up your data
I hope that this article has provided some guidance, inspiration and food for thought. If you are looking to enhance your hosting infrastructure, please remember that you can speak to an iWeb hosting expert about the range of solutions available and that advice and initial setup is free with iWeb.
And even if, having evaluated your situation and considered some of these alternatives, you feel that a high availability solution is not necessary and that your website is set up to handle the holiday periods, do still consider backing up your data!
At a price that won’t break the bank and with a very simple way to manage and restore backups, this essential (some would say) level of protection allows you to restore your website and customer data before during and after the all important Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas holiday sales.
Do you have any experiences or tips to share? Add your comment below!