A beginner's guide to online disasters

• Jonathan Crossfield
• 8 February 2010
• Page 1 of 3 : single page

Photo credit: Where's your parachute if your online business ever needs to hit the panic button?

There's plenty of talk about how to achieve fantastic things on the web, but what if things don't exactly go according to plan? Accidents happen. Jonathan Crossfield looks at how to avoid internet disasters.

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The British novelist G.B. Stern wrote, "The optimist invents the airplane and the pessimist the parachute." But is it pessimism that motivates you to be prepared for disaster, or mere practicality?

With all this talk of how easy it is to be highly successful online, and with so many tools available to monitor and analyse every trend, it is possible to be tricked into viewing the best case scenario as a foregone conclusion.

Where's the parachute?

Planning your online strategy based purely around best case scenarios can expose your business to considerable risk. In the battle between budget and infrastructure, it often becomes harder to justify paying for what seems unnecessary when everything is going smoothly. But this kind of gambling - although extremely common - can prove far more costly over time.

You might jetset around the country every week for your entire working life and never experience so much as a stale vol-au-vent, never mind a plane crash. But would you therefore dispense with the life rafts, inflatable jackets and masks falling from the ceiling in return for a cheaper fare? Of course not. We would never take such risks with our personal safety, regardless of the low statistical likelihood of disaster.

We understand that a positive personal history of successful flights doesn't reduce the risk of something unexpectedly going wrong next time you stow your table and strap yourself into your seat to be hurled at brain-melting speeds through the sky inside a large metal dart.

Business disasters might not be quite as serious as a sudden high speed stop on the side of a mountain, but then the remedies are also far easier and cheaper. So why risk your business by not planning for how you could recover from the worst, even when things are going superbly well? Where's your parachute?

"Where did my website go?"

A crash of a different kind can be a disaster for any online business.

As online business continues to evolve and new methods of attracting attention are developed, website traffic has become far more volatile. Traffic can run steady for days at a time, until the day a link appears in just the right place for thousands of people to jump on board at once. Social media has increased this possibility, where a single tweet on Twitter, vote on Digg or mention in a popular blog can start a chain reaction causing a massive burst in traffic.

Earlier this year, popular T-shirt site Threadless announced a one day only sale - every T-shirt was reduced to only $9! Threadless is extremely good at self-promotion and effectively used email marketing and social media to build buzz. The $9 sale message spread very fast and very far, resulting in a huge spike in traffic to the Threadless website - including a lot of eager first time visitors, credit card in hand.

When the traffic spiked, it should have been time for the Threadless team to pop the champagne corks for a marketing job well done, but it quickly turned into a disaster. All that simultaneous activity placed incredible strain on the Threadless servers. Their hosting service couldn't cope with all the transactions trying to squeeze through, so the servers crashed. And once the servers crashed, there wasn't any selling of $9 T-shirts going on.
The servers are the hard drives where your website information is stored. Every time a person interacts with the website, it sends a request for information and then returns that data to be displayed in the browser. Take that server offline and your online business disappears until it can be restored!

Bandwidth is the ‘pipe' that connects your website on the server to the internet browser on your customer's monitor. It is a measure of the amount of digital information that can be accessed in any one moment. For example, if your main webpage is 300 kilobytes in size, then every time a web browser accesses it, 300kb of data travels down the ‘pipe'. How fast this data is transferred depends on how many people are accessing data down the pipe at the same time and how large your pipe is.

If your ‘pipe' can cope with a certain amount of data transfer per second, but the number of people trying to access your website exceeds this data limit, problems begin to occur.

So it was with Threadless.

Even after the server was back online, it was incredibly slow to load and process customer transactions. For most of the 24 hours of the Threadless sale, accessing and buying a T-shirt from the site was a painful, if not completely futile, activity. Threadless' brand image was hurt. How many of those customers who never got to buy a T-shirt, as well as those who did but were frustrated by the experience, would be discouraged from returning in the future?

Many hosting companies store websites together on a single shared server. This means that if one website experiences a heavy load, it can crash the server and affect all the other sites stored with it. By comparison, large hosts such as Netregistry store websites in a clustered hosting environment, preventing the performance of one site from affecting those around it.

Different hosting environments have alternative configurations. It is wise to check with your provider what to expect should you experience a flood of traffic. How many connections to the internet (or pipes) are available? What redundancies are in place to reduce the risk of crashes?
Threadless was wise enough to email its customer base the following day to apologise and extend the sale a few extra hours. But apologising to customers is not a symbol of a successful online strategy. With a bit more planning to ensure the servers and bandwidth could cope with unexpected spikes in traffic, Threadless could not only have avoided a disaster but raked in all those extra sales.

"My bill is how much?"

Crashing the server is not the only risk when chewing through data in a traffic spike. If your hosting account has a monthly limit on data transfer, unexpected spikes in traffic that take you over that limit can cause headaches.

Similar to your home internet or mobile phone accounts, you have a capped limit on your hosting service. Go over that capped amount and two things can happen: