If you're business gets the benefit of some unexpected, free publicity, will your web site keep up with the hundreds of thousands of hits and keep your business on-line so you can reap the benefits?
These days there isn't even a question that your business needs an online presence. At the very least it's the place potential customers will visit when they want a bit more information on your business or vitally your contact details. You've spent time and significant money on designing a cool looking web site. It's functional, it allows customers to find out about your business, perhaps log into an online account or even be a primary sales channel.
Picture this: You normally attract a few hundred unique visitors a day. You're web site is hosted with a reputable service provider and is based on a dedicated hardware running your site. You paid handsomely for the privilege of a resilient set up running dual servers behind fault tolerant firewalls and load balancers. One friday evening, "it" happens. Your site goes off-line. The first you hear of it is when your IT team send you a text message telling you your web site is down. They are struggling to figure out what's going on. Network failure? Hardware failure? Software application issue? Denial of Service attack? No, the site just looks really really busy and all with what looks like legitimate traffic. There's just so much of it that the infrastructure can't cope!
Turns out that Stephen Fry just tweeted a comment that he liked your product, and suddenly the entire world is checking out your web site, only it simply isn't scaled for that level of activity. You now have a few options, but time is critical. The half-life of publicity storms is typically less than 24 hours, so reacting fast is vital.
Just wait
You can wait for the traffic to die down and miss all those valuable eyeballs in the process!
Add more infrastructure
Call your service provider and ask them to "beef up" your infrastructure. Assuming they have the people and resources available and they aren't going to use it as an opportunity to fleece you.
Simplify your content
It's far easier and faster for a server to service static, cacheable content. So setting up a quick holding page with the basic information about your business will often get you back up and running. Realistically this is the only sensible and quick way forward.
Clearly there is a better way and that involves planning ahead and making sure your infrastructure is properly designed and scaled. Sure, you can simply invest in a much bigger infrastructure up front to make sure you can cope with this type of event, but it won't feel right to your CFO to have an infrastructure <5% utilised. There are much smarter options available that might suit your environment such as:
- Content Distribution Networks (CDN) that allow the content to be serviced from a network of shared servers around the globe.
- Hybrid cloud solutions that allow you to scale up your web servers on demand by making use of virtual infrastructure on shared hardware.
- Cloud based hosting on fully virtual infrastructure with systems in place to automatically increase the resources available on demand.
There are many options, but they all need some thought and planning in advance.
Your 15 minutes of fame can come from many positive and negative places, from a major PR win getting your business mentioned on the front page of the BBC news web site, a random celebrity tweet, or perhaps a product failure that needs dealing with. What they all have in common is
- They can strike at any time.
- They will generate 100 times the demand on your web site than a normal day
- Being off-line during the event is not good business.
If you want to discuss how to analyse your site and its infrastructure to understand if it will cope with the demand of your 15 mins of fame drop us a line at Techsensei.