Cyber Monday is HERE! But are you ready?
Want more? Here’s the full report:
DNS Made Easy experts have joined together for a round-table to discuss the common DNS-related problems that bring down websites during Cyber Monday and the rest of the holiday season. The group has also come up with a very simple, and widely applicable plan to help nearly any online business prepare their website for the holiday season.
With Cyber Monday only seven business days away, many online businesses still don’t have the adequate infrastructure or services to combat the many risks associated with holiday traffic. This year the stakes are even higher, with analysts claiming that last year, America spent over $2 billion on Cyber Monday e-commerce spending. This year, experts predict that sales will peak at $3 billion, breaking all previous records by a landslide.
With this much money at stake, businesses’ foremost focus is perfecting the front-end of their sites, but most are neglecting to maintain their back-end infrastructure when it comes to DNS. DNS is the backbone of the internet, without it the front-end collapses and every year there are a slew of ecommerce sites that break under the pressure of the holiday traffic. In most cases it’s because their DNS infrastructure is weak. “It’s not the little companies that are breaking under the weight of the traffic though, it’s the larger companies with in-house infrastructure like online retail or department stores that neglect to outsource their DNS,” says President of DNS Made Easy Steven Job.
Most will remember the infamous Cyber Monday outages from just the past 4 years that took down boutique stores like Urban Outfitters and Motorola for hours at a time. Even Walmart and Kohls have suffered from intermittent or afternoon long outages, forcing the companies to extend their specials into Tuesday. “Not only are you having to pay for the IT costs to investigate the issue, repair your system, or even purchase new infrastructure… but these companies have to miss out on the largest day for online revenue,” says Job.
Even if users aren’t getting a 404 error message, there are many other concerns that companies aren’t prepared for. Most DNS infrastructures lack the capacity to maintain their low resolution times during periods of heavy traffic, like the holiday season. According to a recent study, 40% of visitors will abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. These slowed resolution times could be losing companies thousands, if not millions of dollars on crucial days like Cyber Monday.
In efforts to abate these widespread issues that could potentially take down any business with an online storefront; the DNS Made Easy team has curated a quick list of tips to not only survive the holiday season, but prosper. With contingency plans that include DNS Failover, to corrective measures like Round Robin or Global Traffic Director; the experts have collaborated to bring users a full DNS management plan for the holiday season. The full report will be available as an eBook to help business owners and system administrators prepare for the coming 2015 holiday season.
