The Grinch Who Stole E-Commerce: Will Site Downtime Ruin Your Black Friday?

When choosing a hosting provider for your online store, your decision can make or break your holiday season. Today's economy has forced many businesses to reassess their budgets and lean toward cheaper services. However, if costs eclipse reliability, cheaper may end up costing more in the long run. If you want robust online sales this holiday season, the first step is to make sure that you have a reliable host that will keep your site up and running through the traffic surges of Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the rest of the holiday shopping season.

What’s the Worst That Could Happen?

Due to the hype of holiday shopping during the past few years, Macy’s, Wal-Mart, and Sears have all experienced downtime on Black Friday, one of the largest online shopping days of the year. On Black Friday 2006, Walmart.com and Macys.com were down from around 4 am until a little after 2 pm. Sears.com experienced the same Black Friday trauma two years later.

Gap faced similar issues in 2008 on Cyber Monday, the Monday following Black Friday, as the site oscillated from accessible to inaccessible throughout the day. A number of maintenance and internal server error pages were displayed. Eventually, Gap solved the issue and stated "unprecedented levels of traffic" as the cause.

For all of these companies, having a hosting infrastructure designed to handle this capacity would have made a dramatic difference in sales. In recent years, sales for online U.S. stores between November 1st and December 20th have averaged around 21.7 billion. Last year, Cyber Monday alone saw 846 million in online spending.

However, the holiday season isn’t the only time site failure occurs. Spikes in traffic can cause outages anytime of the year. Socks4Life, an online diabetic socks company, faced this problem after a CBS news spot aired which praised the company for their tremendous growth. Within minutes, the website became inaccessible. Luckily, their managed host was a reliable provider who was able to quickly remedy the problem.

Sephora.com, an online beauty site, was not so lucky. Sephora fell victim not only to Cyber Monday downtime during 2008’s holiday season, but also faced numerous reliability issues throughout the following two weeks and even into this year. Excuses about server connection problems do little to appease their increasingly frustrated 3 million monthly visitors.

Downtime Ripple Effects

Site downtime doesn’t just affect your ability to generate revenue, but it also damages your brand’s image. Regardless of whether a visitor converts into a customer, maintaining a site without hosting problems is important to establishing a good impression with your visitors. The look and feel of your site resonates as the definitive description of your services. For Sephora, an inaccessible site could leave visitors with the negative impression that Sephora’s marketing message, one of quality and reliability, is inconsistent with the actual quality of the company.

Imagine that you own a brick and mortar shop that closes randomly and whose sign has fallen over. Even if your products are great, it’s unlikely that you’ll establish the reputation you desire without taking the effort to create a consistent presence. Downtime during major shopping days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday leaves a bad taste in the mouths of holiday shoppers. 

How to Find a Reliable Host

When searching for a reliable host, it’s important that you pay attention to their history and their specialties. You may be signing on with an excellent provider whose specialty is in a different platform than the one you’ve chosen to use. They’ll take your business, but you may not be getting the same quality of expertise that you would get if you were on their choice of platform, or if you had chosen a hosting provider who specialized in the type of hosting you require. Once you decide what kind of platform your site requires, you will want a host that actually specializes in that platform, not just does it.

The hosting industry is a diverse field filled with a variety of offerings. Some hosts specialize in Windows hosting or Linux-based offerings, while others specialize in specific shopping cart solutions. Once you’ve defined what your specific needs are, proceed accordingly.

Some hosting companies may outright broadcast their specialty because their business depends on their market share in that niche, but others may claim expertise in a broad range of services. If you’re having trouble deciding if the host you’re considering is right for you, don’t be afraid to investigate their history. Have they received outside recognition for their work with the platform you’ve chosen? If they’re a specialist, were they a part of the technology beta? Can you talk to any of their current and/or past clients? These are important questions you should think about asking any potential hosting provider.

Conclusion

For many online retailers, the holiday season is “the big game”. For both traditional shops and e-commerce-based businesses, Black Friday marks the beginning of a dramatic increase in revenue. When it comes to keeping websites up and running this time of year, there’s historically been no lack of shortcomings from the e-commerce industry. The question is: will you be ready? If you’re launching a new e-commerce effort or have had even minor hosting issues in the past, you need to evaluate your position to ensure that you’re ready to deliver a consistent shopping experience during this year’s holiday season. Your success depends on it.