Databarracks offers to help online retailers keep their Christmas sparkle
Cyber Monday on 3rd December is set to be busiest day of the year for online retailers in the UK with forecasters* predicting an estimated 115 million visits to online retail outlets. However, a concentrated surge in visitor numbers can leave IT systems struggling to keep up.
Many businesses (and their customers) will be noticing their website is sluggish - leaving users frustrated and retailers less likely to make a sale.
Cloud services provider, Databarracks, is offering online retailers free consultancy and analysis of systems to see how they could use AWS to effectively handle seasonal peaks in website traffic.
"Seasonal-based shopping can account for a large proportion of annual sales, so it's essential your infrastructure can deliver when it's busy," says James Watts, Head of Marketing at Databarracks. "Online retailers often suffer from poor performance at Christmas as their IT infrastructure can't cope with the extra demand. You could choose to buy more servers to meet the additional requirement but these are likely to rest dormant for the rest of the year.
"Cloud computing solves this problem; AWS uses features like Auto-Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing to give you seemingly unlimited performance and resources. You always have the power to keep up during the peaks but you aren't left with lots of spare capacity when sales and site visitors are lower the rest of the year," says Watts.
As the Christmas count down accelerates, retailers may well be starting to experience performance issues but, at this stage, it is too late to make any major changes without risking lost sales. Hence, the offer is timed to take place when Christmas is over and the New Year sales have finished.
"Businesses will be able to reflect on the period and look at ways to improve for next year," says Watts. "Our consultants will be on hand to advise retailers on how they could use AWS to keep costs down and performance up in preparation for the next seasonal spike."
To take advantage of Databarracks' free consultancy offer, simply call 0800 033 66 33 before December 31st to book your assessment session and report. Sessions are timed to take place from 14th January to 28th of February 2013, once the Christmas rush is over and to allow a proper assessment of how websites performed over the busy period.