December 5, 2006 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Managed hosting provider SingleHop (singlehop.com) said on Friday that the downtime that struck amazon.com Thursday, November 23 and walmart.com on Friday, November 24 might indicate the potential of holiday shopping traffic to slow retail sites, and even knock them offline.
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"Planning scheduled maintenance that precludes consumers from buying on one of the busiest shopping days of the year really doesn't add up. We expect that with the predicted record influx in traffic, a large number of online retailers will be unprepared, which will result in downtime that can cost businesses thousands of dollars in lost revenue, and as seen in some high- profile cases, as much as $1M per minute. These are numbers you can't ignore," says Zak Boca, president of SingleHop.
The company points out a predicted holiday spending of more than $32 billion, with consumers spending more than 53 percent of their holiday budgets online. It refers to studies that indicate a customer is likely to leave a poorly performing site, and that a retailer has eight seconds to capture a customer’s attention before they move on.
"Your servers and e-commerce applications have to have the additional capacity to handle the holiday rush," says Boca. "Online retailers should test and prepare their systems for a 40 percent spike in traffic, which means that your Web site, your shopping carts, and your ordering systems should be capable of supporting an additional 40 percent of utilization. If your performance audits show that your systems aren't capable, it's important to cluster, which essentially scales a Web site across multiple servers."
