While researching on Internet industry report found one by a research organization’s special report on server load monitoring and balancing.
Its interesting and would like to share some highlights from it.
* 50 – 53% of buyers walk away and 78% of them buy from your competitor’s website if your site is slower during peak loads.
* almost 40% will never come again to your site because of their past experience of a slow website (even if you spend a lot on advertisements)
* 88% if customers with poor experience are less likely to return to a site again out of which 42% have actually discussed with their family, friends, peers or online. So negative marketing of these companies when its crutial to get orders.
* 51% of customers actually spend a major portion of their budget during peak traffic times and wouldn’t tolearate slow web performance.
* 35% of customer actually make travel bookings during peak traffic.
* 67% of visitors believe ” I expect the website to work no matter how many visitors they have ”
Now the basics. What is peak traffic ?
Days and times when maximum people come to a website either because of a special promotion or holiday season or coverage by TV channels (not advertisements) or times 10am to 11am, 1-2pm, 4:30 to 5pm.
Sachin Tendulkar went to a temple few years with his wife in south India. It got discussed on TV channels and the server hosting that temple website crashed because of too much load. They rebooted the server and again within few minutes it crashed. Finally the site had to be shifted to another bigger server so that it wouldnt crash and sites of others on that server wouldnt get affected.
BUT 2 weeks after the incident the load is back to normal because people forgot it.
What to do for this peak load scenario ?
* Host with a company which has a policy to balance their server loads.
* Call up your hosting guys and inform them in advance of some event before its schedued (like coverage in news or exams on the site) so the hosting company can monitor your site and allocate resources accordingly.
* If a site is expected to generate heavy load try and convert the major pages from PHP to HTML the servers handle them easily without problem.
* Reduce the image sizes to as small as possible. Some customers insist a 2MB high resolution image to be place on their home page when a 50KB file would do the job equally well. Reducing the load time helps during peak loads.
SkyWeb put a maximum of 200 sites on a shared hosting server sometimes even less and we insist that customers donot hard code their website IP in any application because we switch sites amongst servers to manage an even load on servers. Our hosting plans are designed for peak loads on not on how many we can cramp on a server.
hope this helps
SkyWeb