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How would you feel if your website went down on Valentine’s Day, Black Friday, or in the vital sales period before Christmas? Experiencing a website failure on a massive sales day isn’t just disappointing for your potential customers, but can have a severe impact on your bottom line. Instead of reaping the fruitful online sales projected in your sales goals, you face the very real possibility of lost profits in the realm of thousands or even millions.
But why would your website go down suddenly?
When special sales or promotions create a dramatic surge in web traffic, many sites cannot handle the extra pressure. Even notable brands like RedBubble, Target, MAC, and Nike experienced global outages during Black Friday 2020, proving that no website is too large to fail. Upon inspecting the problem, experts reported that these outages were largely due to the sites’ inability to deal with the sudden spike in visitors.
It’s a lesson that hasn’t gone unnoticed in the e-commerce community. With commercial giants reporting drastic sales losses during each new outage, these failures became cautionary tales prompting other websites to up their game. In essence, preparation now can prevent disaster later. But how can businesses ensure that their website is adequately prepared?
Load Testing and Load Balancing to Avoid Outages
Many web outages have their roots in insufficient testing of the sites. When business owners don’t know the maximum traffic capacity their websites can handle, they cannot possibly prepare for crucial e-commerce days like Black Friday weekend.
Once this capacity has been established, then businesses can implement techniques to improve and expand their websites’ stability. This is where load balancing comes in. Load balancing essentially enables your site to distribute the pressure of incoming traffic across multiple servers, databases, clouds, or locations, so no single point buckles under a sudden wave of visitors.
So, how can you get started with load balancing for your brand? The web performance experts at Snapt suggest two effective ways to institute load balancing for your website or app, so your platforms are stable and prepared for any traffic surge. Which one is right for you depends on whether you want the scale and flexibility of a centralized Load Balancer-as-a-Service offering, or the simplicity of a single, locally managed load balancer product.
1. Cloud Load Balancer
Snapt Nova provides Layer 7 load balancing and AI security on-demand to every node from a centralized UI – any cloud, any platform, any scale.
Snapt Nova provides accelerated website performance for better SEO and a faster user experience; multi-cloud and multi-location load balancing and auto-scaling for high availability and scale; and advanced application-layer security for safe shopping.
Nova is a perfect fit for scalable, distributed, and cloud-native environments, like today’s high- performance e-commerce stores and platforms.
- Intelligent Load Balancer – Snapt Nova is a high performance Layer 7 load balancer that can be deployed anywhere in the world, and can automatically scale up to millions of SSL TPS.
- AI-powered Security – Nova Nodes include the powerful Nova WAF providing secure web application firewalling to prevent hackers, denial-of-service, fraud, bots and more.
- Easy to Use – Deploy your first Nova node in minutes, and have a full load balancing and application firewall deployment minutes after that.
Crafted from an agile DevOps perspective, Snapt Nova stands out from other load balancing and security platforms with intent-based wizards and workflows, machine learning and intelligent automation built-in, and a centralized UI where you can get end-to-end visibility, health checking, and reporting for your whole network.
2. Software Load Balancer
Snapt Aria is a standalone high-performance software Application Delivery Controller, including load balancer, web accelerator, web app firewall, and global server load balancer – any cloud, any VM, or bare metal.
Also providing Layer 7 load balancing, Snapt’s software-based solution ensures that your website doesn’t experience downtime on important e-commerce days. Offering five times faster application performance at 80% lower cost compared to other platforms, it is a comprehensive yet affordable answer to load balancing for businesses of any size and budget.
- Simple and Powerful – Snapt’s software load balancer is easy to deploy and set up within minutes.
- Perfect For One-Box Installs – Snapt Aria is the ultimate single-system ADC solution, and can be run and managed in isolated environments.
- Incredible Performance – Snapt Aria delivers up to 20,000 SSL TPS and 100,000 HTTP RPS on cloud instances and virtual machines.
With multiple packages and service offerings, Snapt is ready to prepare your site with load balancing and more. No more losing customers to slow loading times, checkout failures, or all-out website crashes. Capture every potential sale this holiday season and beyond with a customizable traffic solution that will empower your site with best-in-class performance.
