October 17, 2007 | Posted By : Jonathan Robinson at 4:59 AM PERMALINK | Blog Comments (2)

Should music download sites be worried about their increased downtime?

Unprecedented demand for the new Radiohead album reduced the official website to a standstill last week when fans from all over the world tried to take advantage of an offer to download the new album for just one penny.

Massive demand for the Radiohead album, and elsewhere in the music industry concert tickets for the Spice Girls, resulted in websites experiencing huge usage spikes, which can have a serious impact upon the user experience if not managed properly. Both examples raise the question of scalability and resilience issues for web hosting providers and their customers alike.

These websites are experiencing enormous demand within a very concentrated timescale, but with careful consideration of business critical solutions such as load balanced and high availability infrastructures, plans can be put in place to ensure that spikes in demand do not bring a website to a standstill. This is especially true if there is an anticipated flurry of activity on the site, such as a product release, promotional campaign or user generated content.

Organisations can consider hosting providers that offer short-term contracts with burstable bandwidth for the period of time surrounding a campaign or product launch. In both instances, the site remains accessible and the user experience consistently positive throughout the promotional campaign in spite of the large amounts of data being downloaded.

This situation is further exacerbated if websites or online applications have an international audience with users wanting to access information across different time zones. When Radiohead fans in the US found out about the special offer, the already struggling website was further deluged with stateside fans eager to take advantage of the special offer.

It seems music, and indeed any, download sites should be aware of the impact of promotional offers and product launches on the resilience of their sites. Increasingly users expect websites to be up and running 24x7 but at these most profitable periods, availability should be a key consideration early in the planning process.

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IMO the download time required by most of the sites is pathetic. They take hours and hors if the size is big. I would certainly appreciate if something good is done about this.

# Posted By WindowsDave | 10/24/07 8:23 AM

Thank you for highlighting a very important (And often overlooked) aspect of running a website. As a hosting provider I would offer a very sage piece of advice. Before launching a major marketing event or ongoing push, contact and involve your web site's host. It sounds simple and logical enough, but is rarely done. Most web service customers think that we will "magically" intuit the needs and instantly provision additional resources from our vendors/providers for what is often $20 a month. The reality is that networks simply do not run in this fantasy world. What ends up happening is some site gets "hot listed" for some marketing promotion and we get slammed with an instantaneous resource crisis. We redirect traffic to additional servers and alter layer 3 routers as fast as we can praying that we don't take down Other Customers performance below acceptable CIR levels. It is a nightmare. A preventable nightmare that we have tools and resources to predict load levels and allocate standby resources should the demand require it. We can even recommend and assist in creating other complete solutions using other providers to spread out the load geographically.
Getting your provider in the loop of the planning process will resolve many of these overload crisis situations before they become unmanageable.

# Posted By Dave Sherry | 10/25/07 4:02 PM

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