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(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- In light of the boost in traffic online retailers are likely to expect over the holiday season, web hosting provider Hostway (www.hostway.co.uk) released a warning to online retailers on Tuesday to plan for extra website capacity this Christmas, especially if they've got a lot of video content on the site, or risk losing customers to competitors.
Although this trend of heightened traffic during the holidays isn't a new concept, Hostway's focus on video-heavy e-commerce sites raises an interesting point as more and more online businesses are beginning to offer high-bandwidth video trailers and reviews of their products through their websites, which could result in slow website performance or downtime during peak season shopping demands.
"Video content is the new ticking time bomb for online retailers," says Thomas Herbert, product manager at Hostway. "Although most e-commerce operations have now dealt successfully with website performance issues, video content brings a gamut of new problems this Christmas. If a large number of people access video reviews or trailers at the same time, this can really slow down websites, and as we all know, poor performance can often be a deal-breaker for Christmas shoppers."
Despite speculations that retailers will be expecting a slowdown this year, online Christmas sales are set to increase by 10 percent this year as more consumers use the Internet for their gift and food shopping, according to recent research by Deloitte.
Recent figures from Jupiter also reveal that consumers in the UK are predicted to spend an average of 710 online in 2008 and will make an average of 9.3 purchases online during the year.
As such, Hostway says companies should actually be planning for a higher volume of traffic this Christmas and be especially prepared to maintain their websites if they use videos to promote and feature their products.
"With proper planning and the right tools, online stores don't need to experience these problems, and can make sure that they maximize their revenues during the festive season," says Herbert.
Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
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July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
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May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
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