Holiday Hosting Part Two: Fear of Failure
It turns out that "Black Friday," the festively named day that officially kicks off the holiday shopping season, has an online analogue, known as "Cyber Monday."
Personally, I first heard about Cyber Monday this week, through a press release issued by Web hosting provider Host Depot, part of another perennial Web hosting effort I've come to regard as about as reliable an occurrence as the Web-hosting-as-gift offer.
Host Depot's announcement was part of the company's campaign to warn Internet retailers that their Web sites are sure to suffer under the strain of this year's online holiday shopping traffic.
While Cyber Monday is regarded by some as the peak of the year's online shopping activity, Host Depot says it expects the traffic to carry on for several weeks, a claim that would seem to be in line with the also-commonly-held believe that Cyber Monday does not exist as advertised.
Either way, the reality of Cyber Monday is somewhat beside the point, which is that while some Web hosts invariably see the holiday season as an opportunity to push their consumer hosting products, others tend to aim a step higher up the chain, targeting retailers as they prepare for their busiest time of the year.
Web hosts push two separate and almost-conflicting messages to retailers this time of year. On the one hand, holiday shopping traffic is a precious resource and retailers should fight to grab their share of the bounty. On the other, holiday shopping traffic is a threat to the stability of a retailer's site - that is, retailers that have failed to take adequate precautions, and of course, "hey, we can help you with that."
UK Web host Fasthosts pointed out last week that UK retailers are in danger of missing out on their share of £5 billion in holiday spending without adequate hosting support.
It might be an exaggeration to call this "fear mongering." After all, there is a tremendous amount of online holiday spending. And there is a real danger of an inadequately prepared site being knocked offline by a surge in traffic.
Managed host SingleHop thinks recent outages at the Amazon and Wal-Mart Web sites are evidence of this, though neither company seems to have indicated that any downtime was a result of being overwhelmed.
My question is this - how many Internet retailers can rightfully expect an overwhelming surge of holiday shopping traffic, but are unaware that their sites might stand to suffer from this increase?
Granted, this is almost pure speculation, but I would imagine that the very biggest retailers see the lion's share of that projected holiday spending. And those companies, Wal-Mart and Amazon especially, are more than well aware of their need for scalability under the circumstances.
What's more, I would imagine that the number of newly launched and under-supported e-commerce sites capable of attracting a potentially crippling flood of holiday traffic, but unprepared to handle that traffic, is small indeed. And those few businesses that might fit this description, it might reasonably be assumed, do not make a priority of foresight.
Call it preaching to the choir, or preaching to the deaf. Either way it seems like it might be a waste of preaching.
Tags: Tags: holiday, shopping, marketing, cyber monday, host depot, fasthosts, singlehop
