Is your website efficient enough to withstand the sudden spike in traffic?

The world is transforming and technology is playing a major role in this transition. Now, before we begin, let me ask a quick question:

Have you ever come across a statement which says – If your business is not on the web your business does not exist?

Indeed, we all have. Today, a website is an integral part of each and every business model, be it a core product manufacturing, banking, healthcare, insurance, aviation, hospitality, social networking, shopping, e-commerce, education or any other domain. 

website-load-testingIf any business has to be leveraged, simplified and have to reach a large number of audience, then the website has to be integrated with the mainstream business of any organization and with the introduction of cloud computing, the trend of hosting the websites started shifting towards it.

As per the latest survey conducted by Right Scale on the cloud computing trends, private cloud adoption increased from 63 percent to 77 percent year-over-year.

The reason is simple – on-demand access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications and services) which can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort ⁽¹⁾.

Like Frederick Wilcox quoted “Progress always involves risks. You can’t steal second base and keep your foot on first.”

Precisely, somehow, website-performance-testingsomewhere we have heard or faced such scenarios in our real life.

Let me support it with an example – In the recent past, one of the planet best providers of cloud based CRM solutions have suffered a website outage due to the unexpected traffic.

The story started when the Cloud based CRM provider partnered with Gartner for their brand promotion.

Gartner placed them in its prestigious magic quadrant list and soon after the list is up on the web, there was an unexpected traffic on CRM solution provider website (traffic from Gartner + their own traffic) which resulted in the sudden outage.

The company having a user base of more than 3 million not only get their brand reputation ruined, but also resulted in loss of capital and time. In short, the Branding backfired.

Similarly, one of America’s best luxury retail chain stores have suffered a website outage on busiest shopping day of the year, Black Friday, soon after they started offering deals up to 60% off, on its online store.

The website has got a sudden rise in traffic, which resulted in shutting down. In the case of a Luxury Retail Store Chain, an e-commerce outage is particularly one of the worst nightmare: the department store chain gets about 25% of their revenue online, making it one of the most e-commerce reliant brick-and-mortar stores.

The outage comes two years after a data breach hit the Luxury Departmental store chain in time for the holiday season in which hackers stole credit card information from as many as 350,000 customers.

Last Black Friday, it was America’s largest electronic retail chain which was an unlucky one, suffering one-hour outage at peak shopping times because of a surge in mobile traffic and they have clearly termed it as a technology glitch.

With the instances above, every reader must be thinking one thing for sure: Being best in their business, how come they didn’t think of such scenarios and if they have thought why does this happen. Am I right? I believe so.

So, what Causes those web sites to crash?

There may be a lot of reasons pertaining to the same, but if we look at it deeply and in a more technical way we can understand that it’s nothing more than a load problem. 

After all, an overloaded escalator cannot take the passengers up or down, irrespective of the fact that who is the manufacturer.

Server Maintenance or webmaster errors can also be a reason where we can relate it, but at the end what matters is performance.

So the question here arises, is your website compatible enough to respond to the sudden changes in load? Is it performance ready? Does software performance testing services help reduce the risk of such outages?

Here is the Load & Performance Testing Video which can help you understand the scenario in a better way and we’d love to hear your thoughts on this matter.

Thank you for reading and stay tuned because coming up next is the another big thing.