The Christmas web traffic rush: “We’re really not ready!”

The last few days, hours and minutes tick by before Black Friday and similar days, all designed to drum up feverish consumer fervor for festive holiday bargains. Most e-commerce sites enforce a code freeze leading up to these all-important days, hoping to prevent outages and other unforeseen headaches. (Assuming that the biggest retailers follow this practice, it seems it’s not a foolproof strategy.)

But, let’s say you already know before the shopping has even begun that your infrastructure is not robust enough to match peak demand?

Possibly you just wait and see and hope nothing goes wrong. After all, what can you do once the code freeze begins? Shrug your shoulders and let the chips (or sites) fall where they may.

You could take the other extreme: Run through the hallways screaming, hoping that hysteria helps your case: “But we’re really not ready!” (Probably not a sound strategy either.)

Cloud to the rescue?

Could it be, though, that there is a third, middle way to circumvent the impending limitations? Okay, it might not help you after you reach the “no more changes” point of no return heading into the maelstrom of online Christmas shopping. Maybe, though, you could consider giving yourself a head start on next year by simply turning on some powerful cloud caching, which scales up as you need it to, and you can scale it back down on demand - all within a few minutes.

Varnish Plus Cloud is ready to go at your convenience. A low-maintenance, low-cost layer of protection against dreaded downtime and customer dissatisfaction (and possible PR nightmares), Varnish Plus Cloud is available now in the AWS Marketplace with several new platforms coming up in early 2017.

Give yourself and your business an early Christmas present for 2017: Get a head start and use Varnish Plus Cloud on AWS (stay tuned for the new platforms soon). Let your website (and you) experience a pain-free holiday season in 2017 - and pain-free peak traffic periods all year round.

And happy holidays and all the best in 2017 from Varnish Software! 

Photo (c) 2014 Scott Morris used under Creative Commons license.