"Build it and they will come" as the saying goes, and this mantra is repeated for many companies that have built websites. However, for some, a website can be overperforming and groaning under the weight of traffic. It sounds like a good problem, but if it means your customers have a bad experience when the servers can't cope, you need to act. "While most website owners don't have to worry about huge spikes in traffic, it can and does happen, like after a successful newsletter, popular article, or viral video," says Karl Mendez, managing director of CWCS. Managed Hosting. "However, if a web server is overloaded and causes a temporary outage, it can do more harm than good to businesses. After all, online users expect websites to load quickly and they most likely don't." It's for them to go elsewhere." This tension can arise during holidays or other special events. The run up to Christmas is an obvious example, but other times of the year can surprise website owners. "Popular consumer events like Black Friday are a great example of when overly successful retail websites have a hard time managing," said John Beechen, manager of managed services at Salmon. "As a result, websites can experience crashes, slow browsing due to degraded site load times, and on retail sites, queues implemented to deal with high volumes can frustrate customers."
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monitoring the situation
It's all too easy to blame too many users, but often the problems are caused by not fixing problems before they manifest themselves when traffic increases. Paul Griffiths, Riverbed Technology's CTO, explains that website crashes are often the result of a number of network performance issues, such as poor change management or simply a lack of platform capability. form of hosting "If a company doesn't have the monitoring and diagnostic systems in place to detect where the problems are, it can take much longer to fix it and get the website back online normally," he says. In today's competitive environment, it is vital for a digital business to ensure that its website can evolve with the growth of the business, or that the business can quickly fall victim to its own business. success. According to Michael Allen, Dynatrace's vice president of solutions, companies can take a number of key steps to get there. "Load testing is the key to these measures, as it allows companies to see how the website will perform under heavy traffic before it hits," he said. This becomes critical as research has shown that app lags and crashes during periods of high demand directly impact revenue and brand reputation – 75% of all smartphone/tablet users will abandon a buggy, slow or crash-prone mobile site or app, while 42% will complain on social media about a bad online experience. "However, it is also important to continually monitor website performance and maintain real-time visibility into the end-user experience. This will allow companies to step in if users start to run into difficulties, reducing churn rates." and the potential loss of revenue," Allen adds.
capacity planning
Another way for businesses to ensure their websites are up to par is to use capacity planning tools that help prepare for peaks and troughs in demand during national shopping days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
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"Add the layers of complexity created by mobile consumers, and many organizations are finding that applying advanced operational analytics to their capacity planning, using real data as the basis for developing contingency plans, gives them the confidence they need to make critical decisions to support demand spikes," said Peter Duffy, CTO of Sumerian. Duffy says there's no reason for businesses and customers to continue to suffer outages caused by poor IT capacity planning. "Businesses need to be prepared to support growth, and in the age of online sales, it all starts with knowing exactly how much margin they have and having the ability to model different peak demand scenarios on existing and what-if infrastructure." This allows them to know exactly the traffic that they will be able to manage and plan for," he said.
obscure the problem
Mendez says that some companies should take advantage of load balancing in the cloud. He says this allows traffic to spread across multiple virtual cloud servers that are in the same data center, or across multiple data centers for added redundancy. “A load-balanced cloud means that web hosting can be extremely robust and flexible, increasing reliability and therefore the user experience, even as a website grows. Another way to avoid putting pressure on the system is to let someone else take the heat and use a content delivery network (CDN), using queuing systems as a safety valve. . "These redirect visitors to a third-party website until the main site can process them," said Alex Painter, website performance consultant for NCC Group. "Instead of a blank screen or error message, visitors receive meaningful feedback while they wait. This is good for providing a relatively smooth experience and also reduces the extent of traffic issues exacerbated by frustrated users at button presses. update ". Some breakdowns are unavoidable, but if a company takes steps to test and optimize its site, it can at least take the comfort of knowing that it wasn't the architect of its own demise.
Use specialized databases
One of the main factors that brings a website to its knees is its database. Traditional databases were not designed to handle the amount of data that popular websites know about today. To eliminate performance bottlenecks, one of the first things to consider is switching to a NoSQL database, which is purpose-built to handle big data. Its biggest advantage is that NoSQL databases will help you store large volumes of data that may have little or no structure. They will also allow you to add new data types according to your changing needs. Using a NoSQL database will also help you get the most out of your cloud computing architecture. There are several types of NoSQL databases, and you should spend some time evaluating them before zeroing in on the one that meets your needs. If you're using MySQL, you don't necessarily need to migrate to a NoSQL database. Instead, you can use Vitess, which is an open source database clustering system. With Vitess, you can upgrade your existing relational database to handle increased traffic. Some breakdowns are unavoidable, but if a company takes steps to test and optimize its site, it can at least take the comfort of knowing that it wasn't the architect of its own demise.