It’s great to see some genuinely helpful traffic management advice on Stephen Fry’s website, The New Adventures of Mr Stephen Fry. A prolific tweeter, Fry often retweets requests from charities or event organisers, and this inevitably leads to one and a half million followers visiting this site. He fully understands the consequences of his popularity it seems, and the contacts section of his website dispenses the following tips:
“Very few websites can manage that intense traffic. If you wish to ask Stephen to Tweet about a charity or special event which points to your/a website, it must be capable of taking 1200+ calls per second to the website’s server in order to be able to stay live once Stephen’s Tweeted. Please check with your website server provider. Many providers will simply say “Yes it is”. You must double check with a technician for your website.”
Flash floods of traffic to a website are often predictable, whether because of a sale, a sporting event, or a tweet from Stephen Fry and it is imperative that websites learn to prepare for these sudden influxes. The best marketing campaign becomes pointless if the website crashes because it’s not equipped to cope with the number of visits generated. Traffic management software can be quickly and easily scaled up to meet demand, and then equally rapidly scaled back once traffic decreases. All it takes is a conversation between IT and marketing to ensure that the two are in synch, and the rewards of a tweet from Mr Fry can be reaped in full.
An example of this type conversation and collaboration at work can be seen in the case of Domino's Pizza. We have touched on this example and it's relevance in a previous posts.
In a recent interview with Marketing Week, Graham Moore from Zeus takes the discussion one step further as he discusses the possible negative impact on brand reputation if organizations fail to prepare for these anticipated spikes in web traffic.
Organizations that use Zeus Traffic Manager are able to keep applications on-line by using a range of load balancing methods, session persistence and health monitors. The additional use of the Service Level Monitoring and Bandwidth Management modules helps organizations ensure that users get fair levels of service during these spikes in traffic.
Mark Gyles
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