They say it comes around earlier every year. We’re talking, of course, about the Q4 e-commerce rush! If you run an online store or other e-commerce property, you’ll know that the pre-holiday rush of traffic can be both a blessing and a curse. Additional customers are always welcome, but if it catches you off guard, you might find yourself straining to keep up with demand.
This year we’re anticipating a larger spike than ever, as research shows a 28% increase in online shopping compared to this time last year. And we know that a slow site can have a big impact on sales, abandoned carts, and customer satisfaction. Pretty much the opposite of what you’re after!
Don’t worry, this is where we can step in. At Prostack we help clients of all shapes and sizes succeed during the holiday rush, providing flexible and scalable fully managed hosting solutions so sites stay fast and responsive no matter how busy they are!
Here are our tips for the run up to your next big event:
- Preparedness! If you’re planning a sale event, or expecting a large increase in visitor numbers, let us know! We can work with you to optimise your managed cloud or dedicated server and make sure you have the resources you need for superior performance. We’re always on hand, and letting us know ahead of schedule will mean things go smoothly from the moment you launch. The last thing you want to worry about during a traffic surge is whether your server can keep up, and so giving us a heads up will mean peace of mind that we’ve got everything covered.
- Load testing tools. For a more precise idea of how well your site holds up against visitor load, we can simulate traffic ramp-up, so you can be sure that your site will cope. The tools we employ range from the open-source siege to the popular Load Impact (now K6). We typically use your website’s sitemap to replicate user behaviour across a variety of URLs (for example, shopping cart or product pages) over a period of time, giving us an idea of how real-world traffic will perform.
- Optimisations. At Prostack there’s no one-size-fits-all solution, and we carefully tune your environment to fit the application you’re running, to help keep your Time To First Byte as low as we can. TTFB is a key measure of how quickly your web server is able to respond to a HTTP request- the lower the value, the faster requests are serviced, and the more performant your website will be.
For example, if your site is based on a popular ecommerce framework (such as Magento or Woocommerce), we can help with:
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- 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.
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- Database optimisations: We examine database performance and produce a set of recommendations, including query caching, buffer sizes and connection limits.
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- 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 e-commerce and digital agencies alike- check out our case studies to see how we’ve helped our clients.
- Flexible solutions. Our Managed Cloud Servers are a scalable and cost-effective platform on which to run your website. We can easily add CPU and RAM for demand events so that your website has the capacity it needs, or add additional web nodes where appropriate for increased throughput and high availability. These resources can easily be scaled down, too, so you don’t end up paying for compute you’re not using!
- Vertical or horizontal scaling. You might be familiar with the terms “scaling vertically” and “scaling horizontally”, and we can help you do both of these depending on what the situation requires. Vertical scaling (also known as “Scaling Up”) generally refers to adding more resources to the node that your site runs on- such as CPU or RAM. Horizontal scaling (also known as “Scaling Out”) involves adding additional nodes to the pool of resources for your site, so that multiple servers (or VMs) are handling your traffic. This usually involves a load balancer in front of each server to direct requests. Horizontal scaling also introduces additional fault-tolerance to your web application. At Prostack we can advise on the most appropriate solution for your needs and budget, and guide you through implementing it smoothly.
- CDN. We’re big fans of Cloudflare, a Content Delivery Network which provides security and performance services. Cloudflare can help ease the burden on your server by caching static content, or even heavily-trafficked pages such as your homepage, ensuring they load quickly for visitors no matter where they are. We have extensive experience working with Cloudflare to keep your site working quickly.
If you’re a Prostack customer and we’ve got you thinking, drop our support team a message and we’ll be happy to chat.
Not yet a customer? We’ve solutions for every budget. Contact us today to take advantage of our free hosting migration service and see the difference we can make.
