Holiday Sales Push
Networks and Websites to Failure
Here we are at another
Christmas holiday season and our merchants are selling like crazy
meeting their annual goals. So this is a good time to talk about
system limits and why we impose limits to keeps servers available
to all potential clients.
Every Holiday we see big
stories how Yahoo whet offline on Black Friday and 500,000
ecommerce customer's stores were offline. Or how Amazon.com was
down for part of the day costing millions in revenue.
All of this reminds me of when
I first got online, pretty much the day the Internet opened for
business. We used those old 2.5K baud rate modems that ran
through phone lines and required us to enter a user name and
password to begin the dialing process to connect to the Internet.
Of course now,
people enjoy full time Internet access at beyond old T-1
commercial speeds. People watch movies at 10MB/s which is
4000 times faster than those old modems.
But as the Internet was
becoming more popular, as more and more people got on companies
started offering UNLIMITED Internet access for $10 a month to
compete with everyone else.
Of course, if every company
had to deliver UNLIMITED Internet access they could not
provide it for a few very simple reasons:
Limited number
of phone lines
Servers had
limited connection capacity
Most ran data
over slow copper lines T-1, T-3
So all of the equipment in
place by the ISP's was limited, but they were offering unlimited
usage.
So any of you old enough to
remember will remember dialing in over an over getting busy
signals sometimes for an hour before you could connect to the
Internet.
Companies like AOL were the
leaders in dialup access and were also notorious for being
impossible to connect to. People were reduced to downloading APPS
to redial until they could connect sometimes hundreds of times.
AOL's solution was rolling
disconnects. If you were online for more than 20 or 30 minutes,
they would disconnect you so someone else could get on and that
meant you were back to auto dialing until you could reconnect.
Since most people did not
conduct business online and it was just for fun, AOL was able to
grow and build a huge company in spite of the access issues.
Because people wanted UNLIMITED accesss and would stay online for
hours at a time.
But some people did need to do
business online, I was one of them.
After all, all of those
millions of AOL users needed someone to provide ecommerce and
online stores they could shop at.
So for me, I needed to be able
to get online when I needed to get online. If a store needed
attention or a customer needed a website fixed I needed access
and AOL was not reliable.
So you had 2 different
business models:
Both of these business models
had value to users and bot offered very different products.
AOL gave people unlimited
everything but you might spend an hour just trying to find an
open line.
The LIMITED ISP's guaranteed
access but they charged based on how many hours you spent online
or how much data you downloaded.
Now if getting online was
important, you use a limited plan because you depend on that
access to run your business. While if you were just playing games
or chatting with friends you wanted to spend time online and not
have to pay an arm and a leg for it.
Today, website
hosting is in the same position.
Website hosting is constrained
by server limits and connection speeds and yet many hosts are
selling UNLIMITED everything plans once again. And there is a
place for those plans because people want personal home pages and
websites that they wont be charge extra for. Cheap and simple
plans that make having a website fun and affordable.
But for the business that
needs their website available, the ones that don't want to go
offline on the busiest days of the year, they can't use those
unlimited plans because when traffic goes up 300% there are not
enough resources to cover it.
Every years we see unlimited
hosting plans cost retailers billions of dollars in lost sales
during the holiday season.
Now, that is not to say people
spend billions of dollars less, because they don't. Because if
one website is not online, they just go to another one.
So if you are
depending on the last quarter of the year for your sales you need
to ask yourself, is your website going to be available every
minute of every day?
If you are at one of those
UNLIMITED hosting companies I can almost guarantee that you
website will not be accessible a significant amount of the time.
Just like the AOL scenario,
web hosts have limited on the back end. So they could never
really let you have unlimited everything, they just structure the
plan that way so you don't have to worry about metered charges.
But that does not mean your customers wont be getting a busy
signal when they try to access your website.
In fact, you can count on it.
On Black Friday and Cyber
Monday being among the busiest shopping days online traffic
volumes spike and networks are tested and taxed to the limits.
Most will not be able to handle the traffic because they have
sold so many people UNLIMITED access and everyone wants it at the
same time.
For companies like
pageBuzz.com it is one of our busiest times of the year because
merchants hosted at other companies call us panicing that they
can't sell anything and need to move their website ASAP.
In most cases, it is just too
late to make the move to save the holiday season for the and some
go out of business as a result of lost sales. But some smaller
stores are able to make the switch in time to save the holiday
season.
For us, we are faced with the
core of keeping all of the existing stores running without
incedent and trying to facilitate all the new customers that want
to get on a reliable network.
It is a very busy time for us
and naturally very profitable time for us as well.
But we have a profit because
we don't offer the crazy plans that the other hosts provide, we
offer better service and not unlimited everything.
We impose limits but not on
bandwidth, on the size of the stores so we can insure that users
will never exceed our resource limits. We work with small
business that want to be online all the time and are willing to
pay a couple of dollars more for that ability.
In 10 years we have never had
a single store unavailable for over usage. We have never had a
server offline on Black Friday or Cyber Monday, we have never had
a customer call and say they can't get to their website during
the holiday season.
We are conscious of making any
upgrades or changes at this important shopping time of the year.
We know that it is not the tie to try new software, or test new
things or even rebooting servers. Everything must be in tip top
shape and running flawlessly to make sure that every sale can go
through.
Every lost customer is money
out of someones pocket at that is not acceptable when it comes to
ecommerce.
So if your holiday sales are
down this year, look at whether your website was a factor. Was it
available all the time? Did you lose customers? Did you lose
money?
Isn't it time to
look at your website hosting provider and decide if it is right
for your business, before you don't have a business to worry
about at all?
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