PEER 1 Hosting predicts downtime on Cyber Monday

Amazon has decreed it will be 9.20pm on Monday 3rd December. Cyber Monday; the ultimate online shopping peak for Christmas 2012 is approaching and it’s going to be big.

By Dominic Monkhouse, managing director EMEA at PEER 1 Hosting

Actually it’s going to be huge.

Online shopping volume has been growing at around 15% month on month compared to 2011 according to Capgemini’s IMRG Retail Report and Experian is expecting a whopping 115 million visits to UK websites on Cyber Monday, a 36% increase on the busiest Christmas shopping day of last year.

The prospect of ‘busier than ever’ is great for business but a real concern for IT and eCommerce managers.

So what’s changed in your IT infrastructure in a year? Have you brought on new servers? Have you provisioned bursting into the cloud?

If you have, then relax and indulge in a spot of retail therapy yourself, but if Cyber Monday sounds like a disaster waiting to happen, then plan a duvet day and consider spending a few hours updating your CV.

By definition, if eCommerce hasn’t reached the expected intensity and scale ever before, how do we know if we can cope? As much as we all love a pretty front end, it’s what’s underneath the bonnet that really counts when it comes down to website performance.

Whilst more hardware, bigger pipes and emergency scaling can get websites out of a fix – downtime isn’t the only concern on the horizon.

Optimisation of your hosting infrastructure can also have a significant impact on how quickly your eCommerce catalogue pulls images and information from the data base, how quickly your page loads, how much simultaneous traffic you can handle and ultimately how much of all this attention gets through the shopping cart to complete the sale.

Cyber Monday will be a true test of scalable hosting.

PEER1Hosting.co.uk