Your servers and bandwidth have to be big enough. You need to spend a little now to get ready to soak up the flood of orders that are soon to be pouring in.

Forget about Y2K. Get your systems ready for the ecommerce holiday season, make those holiday bucks and worry about Y2k later. If you've got an ecommerce site you are certainly expecting a Christmas boost in traffic and sales that may last into January. You'd better make sure your systems are up to it. We've all heard the horror stories about sites like eBay crashing for days under load. We all know the same thing could happen to our servers.
October 20, 1999

Calculate your present and projected revenue per hour. If you're doing ecommerce you can quickly take the amount of your weekly sales and divide by the number of hours in a week (168) to calculate a rough average of how much money your sites makes in an hour. How does this number grab you if you think of it as revenue lost per hour when your site is down? And traffic will be a lot bigger this Christmas season. If management has interesting projections for ecommerce traffic over the holiday season do the math again on the projected revenue. Then find a bit of budget to get ready because most ecommerce sites can't afford to let any revenue slip past.

Much of what you need to do to get your site ready involves the developer time rather than buying things or services. You'll spend money on techies. You can arrange for some equipment and services to be on standby in case of traffic surges or system problems and perhaps not have to pay too much unless you really need it. But you are going to have to spend some money to do it right. Most of the tuning ideas mentioned here you probably need to do anyway and you will benefit from the resource expenditure even after the holiday selling season. Some of the suggestions here will give a quick boost in traffic - which can lead to new, interesting problems.

Bandwidth

Most people would think of adding bandwidth first. Good idea but if you suddenly buy a much fatter pipe to the Internet you can open up a pent-up flood of traffic that your servers aren't ready for. To be ready for Christmas you need to be sure you understand how your bandwidth provider allows you to burst and/or quickly increase the size of your pipe. And make sure the rest of your systems are ready for any possible flood of new traffic.

You need to determine where the bottlenecks in your system are. I like to start upgrading my bandwidth and hardware at about the 60% utilisation level. If you run into delays in negotiating new services or buying hardware you could easily be up to 80% more before you get the improvements going. I think that's cutting things a bit close. You also don't want to be fiddling with your systems in any major way during the holiday selling season unless you are forced to.

Mirroring or Multiple Site Locations

If you expect large amounts of international traffic you may want to think about mirroring your site overseas. If you're really a Big Time Site you should have a couple of mirrors around the US and three or four in Europe, Australia and Asia. Contact you service provider. Hosting in the US is MUCH cheaper than hosting in Europe but not everyone has a big fat pipe across the pond although most claim to. You should still have your site hosted on the same side of the Atlantic as most of your traffic comes from. The speed of your pages depends not only on how big a pipe you have across the pond but how big a pipe your site visitor has across the pond. The visitor makes a request for a page and then you deliver it. Your bandwidth provider should have a fat pipe across the Atlantic but it's a two-way thing. Your fat pipe is only half the issue. If you users are dialling in to a free or cheapo ISP they may not have a fast pipe across the county much less across the Atlantic. If your content is local for them they should see faster pages.

Horse Power

If you're lucky your server farm is easy to upgrade. Just pop in a couple more processors and some more RAM. Hot pop a few gigantic disk arrays in on the fly. If you have been so budget or time constrained that your servers need to be replaced, rebooted or otherwise taken out of service for a period of time during upgrade, you'd better trot right over to the bull-goose techie's desk and get them on the upgrade task ASAP. If you have good techies they'll probably already know exactly what to buy and how to proceed. They've probably been wondering why the hell they haven't been allowed to do it long before.

Remember you can always hire servers on short notice. There are several services in the UK that hire SUN and Intel equipment on a couple of hours notice.

RAM

One can never be too thin, too rich, or have too much RAM. Add more RAM than you think you'll ever need - you won't be sorry later. Trust me. Cache pages as much as you possibly can.

Clean Up All those Old Messes

Your techies know where the bodies are buried but probably don't want to go and dig them up and fix or rebuild them. Motivating techies is an art and you need to motivate your techies to do whatever is needed to make your site faster. If you're still using scripts for important parts of your sites you should consider server side Java or something faster than CGI. Come up with a speed measurement system you and the techies agree on and give them a bonus for speed increases.

Delete Turds

Check your server logs and look for processes running that can be turned off or otherwise slimmed down. Get rid of all the old crap on your servers that doesn't really need to be there. You can probably get the techies interested in this task if you can give them the uninterrupted time they need to get it done.

Optimise and Get Rid of Graphics

If you are really serious about making your pages faster there are certainly things you can do on your pages to minimise and optimise graphics. Graphics, Java, JavaScript and all the flashy, cool, fun stuff slow down your pages. Trim them down. You can try getting buy-in form your team to do this by offering a bonus like you offered the techies: set up tests separate from the techies' tests to judge improvements in page loading speed and offer a cash bonus for improvements.

It's Now or Never

You of course need to be able to test your systems to make sure you're done everything you can to get ready. Traffic and cash will pour in this Christmas ecommerce selling season. Most businesses, whether bricks and mortar or virtual, rely on the Christmas seasonal income to see them through the lean months. You can't afford to screw it up. Your servers and bandwidth have to be big enough. You need to spend a little now to get ready to soak up the flood of orders that are soon to be pouring in. Right?