Server Scaling to Avoid Disaster: How to stay online and in business
How can online retail businesses avoid disastrous outages that result in dreaded site downtime and lost revenue? Steve Drew, Service Delivery Manager at Open Plus Ltd, argues that scalable servers in the Cloud are the answer.
This year's 'Mega Monday' and the rest of the busy shopping season, like many peaks in online trading, always promised increased traffic volumes to ecommerce sites.
But when peaks in online traffic results in system outages and downtime for retailers' sites, the result does nothing to optimise on heavy trading.
Such technical problems have the potential to be nothing less than calamitous for retailers, as stampedes of shoppers can easily bring an unprepared site to its knees. And the fallout from such incidents is not limited to lost sales; resultant reputation management issues can also stretch a company's PR team to the limit when dissatisfied customers take their grievances to the social networks.
The question in online retailers' minds will surely be how to prevent this kind of event happening in the first place. The answer lies in the correct management and scaling of servers. This solution doesn't just serve you well during a busy promotion either; like light-bulbs, you can switch servers on and off as and when you need to, providing scalability at peak business periods such as evenings and weekends and, of course, Christmas. The ultimate goal is to save those precious pennies. Here are three steps to help your business along this path.
1. Get in the Cloud: If you haven't already, slash your server costs and get in the Cloud. Rackspace and Amazon are good places to start with this. Don't be put off by fears over loss of data or lack of control over physical equipment. Arguably, the Cloud is more secure and far more configurable than traditional models. Just doing this can and will change the nature of your business for the better.
2. Tool Up!: Investigate services such as Rightscale to really begin to see scaling in action, and explore other complementary tools such as Puppet and Chef. The tools are now available to provide pretty much everything you need to automate scalability and much, much more.
3. Build Around the Business: Remember, your IT department is there to serve your business, not the other way round. Your server environment is no exception. Make sure your team understands your business needs before implementation begins.
These pointers will help you save money, gain extra control and enhance configuration around your core ecommerce environment. Most of all, the scalable nature of servers in the Cloud will allow your business to react quickly to peaks in traffic and minimise system outages.
