Black Friday is one of the most anticipated events of the year for businesses of all sizes and as we often say, if you’re planning an online event or expecting a surge in online traffic, let us know! We can work with you to make sure your servers can handle what’s thrown at them.
This year, we’re introducing our new Black Friday Boost Package! This includes a stress testing service and server health check, to ensure you’re in tip-top shape for any upcoming traffic… What’s more, if we find you need a bump in CPU or RAM we’ll give you a 25% discount off our normal upgrade pricing.
We’ll go into the essential steps we follow to get your online store ready and how ProStack can help with a seamless experience for your customers.
Stress Testing Service
Black Friday can bring a sudden spike in traffic that your website may not be equipped to handle. And so our first step in ensuring your site holds up against visitor load is… load testing.
This means we can simulate traffic spikes. By using your site’s sitemap to replicate user behaviour across a variety of URLs (for example, shopping cart or product pages) over a period of time, we can get an idea of how your site holds up under strain.
Doing a stress test in advance of a big event gives you the opportunity to address any bottlenecks you may face and allows you time to upgrade the resources if needed.
Server Health Check and Review
Following the traffic simulation testing (which assesses the impact of the expected higher traffic levels) we’ll then present to you the results, as well as make any additional adjustments to ensure performance is optimal.
With our scalable hosting solutions, you can easily upgrade your resources to accommodate the increased traffic during the holiday season. This ensures your website remains stable and responsive, even during traffic peaks. We can easily add CPU and RAM for demand events so that your website has the visitor capacity it needs, or add additional web nodes for increased throughput and high availability. These resources can easily be scaled down after the busy season, too!
Optimise website performance
When it comes to how fast a web page loads there are a lot of factors involved, from server-side tweaks to site code.
At Prostack, we focus on server response time- how long it takes the server to respond to a HTTP request. This is a complex area and every site is different- a simple blog is going to generally be less resource-intensive than a large e-commerce site, for example. We can help optimise areas such as:
Caching – many frameworks have built-in support for in-memory caching such as Redis or Memcache, or even a FPC (Full-Page-Cache) such as Varnish, so that frequently accessed resources don’t tax your web server or database. We can help implement these to improve overall Time To First Byte and page performance.
Database optimisations – We examine database performance and make sure things are optimal- in areas such as query caching… including query caching, buffer sizes and connection limits.
Tuning – We can make sure your web server (be it Apache, Nginx or something else) is able to handle the volume of requests you’re expecting.
Optimisation is a big part of the service we offer to eCommerce and digital agencies alike- check out our case studies to see how we’ve helped our clients.
Scaling Up
Preparing your business for the Black Friday rush requires careful consideration of your web hosting and server strategies. By assessing your current infrastructure, scaling up resources, implementing CDN and security measures, and closely monitoring traffic patterns, you can ensure a smooth and successful Black Friday for your online store. The cost for the following resources for cloud services are:
1GB RAM : £5.50 Inc. VAT per month
1CPU : £5.50 Inc. VAT per month
10GB disk space : £5.50 Inc. VAT per month
Don’t miss out on the 25% discount off the above upgrade pricing between 1st November 2024 and 31st January 2025- get in touch today!