Most businesses worry about not getting enough visitors to their website.
But what happens when thousands of people arrive at once?
We recently moved one of our ecommerce customers to a new server environment after learning about a major promotional opportunity they had secured with a well-known superstore.
The retailer’s email database contained approximately six million addresses.
That did not mean four million people would visit the website at exactly the same time. However, even a small percentage clicking through within a short period could create a dramatic increase in traffic.
The existing hosting environment worked perfectly well under normal conditions, but it had not been designed to handle that kind of sudden demand.
Waiting to see what happened was not a sensible option.
The problem with a successful promotion
A major email campaign, television appearance, press feature, influencer mention or social media post can send an enormous amount of traffic to a website in a matter of minutes.
That is exactly what the business wants.
Unfortunately, it is also the moment when an unsuitable hosting environment is most likely to fail.
As traffic increases, the website has to process more page requests, product searches, basket updates, customer logins and payments. On an ecommerce website, every visitor potentially places additional demands on the server and database.
If the available resources are exhausted, the website may begin to slow down. Pages take longer to load, products fail to appear and customers struggle to complete their purchases.
In the worst case, the website becomes completely unavailable.
The business has spent time and money creating demand, only for the website to turn customers away at the most important moment.
Taking action before the traffic arrived
Once we understood the potential scale of the promotion, we reviewed the customer’s hosting arrangement and concluded that the existing environment was not powerful or flexible enough.
We therefore moved the ecommerce shop to a self-scaling server environment.
Rather than relying on a fixed amount of computing resource, the new setup can respond to increases in demand. As traffic rises, additional resources can be made available to help the website continue operating effectively.
When traffic returns to normal, the environment can scale back down.
This provides the business with access to greater capacity when it is needed without permanently running an oversized and unnecessarily expensive server.
Most importantly, the move was completed before the promotional campaign began with no downtime to the website.
What is scalable website hosting?
Traditional hosting packages usually provide a fixed allocation of processing power, memory and storage.
That may be perfectly suitable for a brochure website or an online shop with predictable visitor numbers. The difficulty comes when traffic suddenly exceeds the level the hosting package was designed to accommodate.
A scalable environment is designed to respond more flexibly.
Depending on the infrastructure, it can increase the available resources, distribute traffic across multiple instances or create additional capacity when demand reaches a particular level.
However, hosting is only one part of the equation.
A scalable server cannot compensate for a badly built website indefinitely. The website itself also needs to be efficient, with sensible database queries, optimised images, appropriate caching and carefully managed plugins or integrations.
A successful high-traffic setup brings the website and hosting environment together.
Why ecommerce websites need particular attention
An ecommerce website places different demands on a server from a simple information website.
Many brochure pages can be cached, meaning a prepared version of the page can be delivered quickly without rebuilding it for every visitor.
Ecommerce activity is more complicated.
Product availability may change. Shopping baskets are unique to each customer. Account areas need to be personalised and checkout processes require live communication with payment providers, stock systems and other services.
During a busy promotion, the website may need to manage:
- Large numbers of simultaneous visitors
- Product searches and filtering
- Live stock information
- Customer accounts and logins
- Shopping basket updates
- Discount codes
- Payment gateway connections
- Confirmation emails
- Analytics and advertising scripts
- Links to stock, fulfilment or accounting systems
Each of these can add to the demand placed on the website.
This is why an ecommerce hosting decision should not be based solely on the amount of storage included or the monthly price.
Could your website cope with a sudden spike?
A website may appear fast and reliable during an ordinary working day but struggle when visitor numbers increase sharply.
This can create a false sense of security.
If 50 people use the website without difficulty, it does not automatically follow that 5,000 people can use it simultaneously.
Businesses should consider what might cause an unusual traffic spike. This could include:
- A major email marketing campaign
- A national press feature
- A television or radio appearance
- Promotion by a retailer or commercial partner
- A limited-edition product launch
- A seasonal sale
- A competition or giveaway
- An influencer recommendation
- A viral social media post
- A paid advertising campaign
- A new wholesale or retail partnership
These are positive opportunities. The technical environment simply needs to be ready for them.
Communication is part of website performance
The most important lesson from this project was not purely technical.
It was the value of communication.
Had the customer not mentioned the upcoming promotion, we may not have known that a campaign capable of reaching millions of people was about to direct traffic towards the website.
A hosting provider or web agency can monitor performance, review traffic patterns and recommend improvements. What it cannot automatically know is what the business is planning behind the scenes.
This is why regular communication between a business and its digital team is so important.
If you are planning a large campaign, product launch, television appearance, partnership or publicity opportunity, tell the people responsible for your website as early as possible.
That gives them time to consider:
- Whether the hosting has sufficient capacity
- Whether the website needs load testing
- Whether caching is configured correctly
- Whether the database is performing efficiently
- Whether third-party services can handle the demand
- Whether stock levels and checkout processes are ready
- Whether monitoring and alerts are in place
- Whether a temporary or permanent infrastructure change is required
A short conversation before the event can prevent a very expensive problem during it.
Bigger is not always better
The answer is not simply to place every website on the largest and most expensive server available.
Hosting should be appropriate for the needs of the business.
A small brochure website with relatively modest traffic does not need the same infrastructure as a busy ecommerce shop running national campaigns. Equally, an online retailer should not remain on entry-level hosting simply because it worked when the business was smaller.
The right environment should reflect:
- Typical visitor numbers
- Expected traffic peaks
- Website complexity
- Ecommerce activity
- Number of products and orders
- Business-critical integrations
- Security requirements
- Required levels of availability
- Plans for future growth
The hosting arrangement should evolve as the business evolves.
Hosting should support success, not limit it
Marketing and technology cannot be treated as separate parts of a business.
If a campaign succeeds, the website needs to support the resulting demand. If it cannot, money spent generating attention may be wasted and the business may suffer reputational damage at precisely the moment it should be gaining new customers.
In this case, moving the customer to a scalable server environment was not about fixing a website that was already broken.
It was about anticipating what could happen next.
That is an important distinction.
Good website management is not simply responding when something goes wrong. It is understanding the customer’s plans, recognising potential risks and preparing the technical environment before those risks become problems.
If you are planning a significant promotion, product launch or partnership, speak to your web team early.
The best time to discover that your server cannot handle success is not when thousands of customers are already trying to place an order.
At Insignia Creative, we design, host and support ecommerce websites with the wider business in mind. If you are unsure whether your current hosting environment can support your next stage of growth, speak to us about a website and hosting review.