Scaling Ecommerce Hosting for Big Events.
Read this point by point as every element is important to get your site to perform, stay up and collect as much money as possible.
Got an instagrammer with 3 million followers and wondering how to make your website take the traffic without falling over ?
First get the real figures of their 1,2,3,4,5 minute bursts when a post is published, with backed up evidence. This is the difficult part, because agents will talk up traffic, engagement etc. so it is difficult to get real figures.
Optimise the existing site remove all un-used addons, features, widgets. You need all the speed and resources you can get.
Make sure you are fit and healthy and able to cope with stress. This is a real stressful project, it depends on the performance of the site over the peak period.
Make the site as memory light as possible
Build a scaling infrastructure.
Host the database remotely.
Use a CDN to spread the load.
Reserve Infrastructure Resources before the event as there may be availability issues during peak seasons
Make sure your ecommerce platform can take the traffic :
- Look out for Session poisoning, competitors looking to flood your site with bogus traffic
- Cart Clashing, session life spans being long can heighten the risk if session issues.
- Call Back Speeds from your payment provider. If your payment provider is slow in calling back, then there is a risk payments are not matched back on the website.
- Session life time measuring
Host the images on a separate amazon s3 instance.
Host the code across 4 servers using git.
Host as much of the site in flat html as possible to reduce the processing load on the server
Use a load balancing to spread the visitors across the four servers.
Run as many simulations as possible.
Run a failure simulations – Site down – Massive network outage – DDOS attack in the middle of the run ( others will try to sabotage your success )
If you want to have the site up 100% no issues use a queuing service in front of you site to queue the users on. Services like queue-it etc look after this.
Identify all the processing pain points from Marketing to Order Processing
Automate as much as possible, look at order fulfilment, customers don’t care how busy you are.
Automate your marketing
- Prepare and reserve ads in advance ( platforms need time to review your ads )
- Automated all email correspondence
- Automate ads publishing and un-publishing
- Segregate your customers by time zones for time sensitive marketing
- Throttle your broadcast marketing to hep with load balancing
- Maybe suspend review publishing in case there are mishaps in the peak, you need to control the information
“If you cannot automate it – Outsource it”.
- Outsource Order Processing and Stock Management to a specialist ecommerce fulfilment company
- Outsource Returns Handling to specialist handlers
Cancel all holidays ! Everyone needs to be there on hand for peak volume so as to keep it calm for your customers.
All of this needs massive investment and genuine buy-in and passion from management all the way to the top.
“Fail to Prepare – Prepare to Fail”
You need to get a excel sheet to work out the cost of building this architecture so as to make sure you can make money from the promotion. Its really important to do this sum as early on as possible before committing to contracts and expenditure as the costs are considerable.
Talk to our ecommerce volume specialists today. Fill out our contact form.