Snapt: Helping Businesses Avoid Website Crashes During Black Friday and Cyber Monday
No business owner wants to see their websites crash on days like Black Friday or Cyber Monday. After all, these sales days account for huge revenue for online and e-commerce businesses across multiple industries.
Unfortunately, many websites faced a massive outage during these days in 2020 — even such corporate giants as Adidas, PlayStation, Petsmart, H&M, Best Buy, Vistaprint, and Old Navy. From major companies to small entrepreneurs, businesses lost thousands or even millions of dollars due to outages. Some customers couldn’t log in to their websites, while others couldn’t add items to their carts. Faced with these technological failures, customers instead took their purchases to competitors or lost interest altogether.
This year, what if your website faces a similar problem? As the economy bounces back, online shopping is poised to set new records for e-commerce sales. So you may expect to make a handsome profit during your holiday promotions. But those profits will go up in smoke if your website fails to load, or crashes when a customer tries to check out from the payment page.
Why Are Such Huge Crashes Taking Place?
Online shopping was already on the rise, but the advent of COVID-19 has increasingly driven traffic away from brick-and-mortar stores, creating a mass shift to e-commerce. This sharp uptick in traffic is putting websites under more pressure than usual. Unfortunately, not all are well-equipped to handle this extra demand. With sites slow to respond or crashing outright, affected businesses are losing significant revenue and seeing their reputation dented in the public eye.
To put it simply, these websites couldn’t manage the load of so many people surfing the sites and placing orders simultaneously. What’s the solution? Experts suggest that websites should use a load balancer like Snapt to handle this pressure.
What Is Snapt?
Snapt is one of the best load balancing solutions on the market right now. Its cloud-based load balancer, Snapt Nova, distributes your website’s traffic load between multiple servers, databases, clouds, locations, and more, with automated scale-out and scale-in, to ensure that you’re prepared to keep up with massive demand, even during blockbuster occasions like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or post-Christmas sales.
Smart, scalable, and secure, Snapt leverages years of technological expertise to help your brand provide reliable online service for clients and customers on any day of the year.
Why Is Snapt Essential for Your Business?
It’s hard to imagine that online retail giants, such as Etsy, Paypal, and even Apple faced outages on Black Friday 2020. But these aren’t unprecedented issues. Back in 2019, Costco encountered a similar incident and ended up losing around $11 million. Imagine what might happen to your business if you lost such a staggering amount of money.
With Snapt, you can bid these worries farewell. Snapt’s load testing services reduce the risks of downtime by testing your peak capacity in advance, while Snapt Nova’s load balancer ensures your website won’t crash — no matter how many customers log in simultaneously. This cloud-native platform lets you dynamically create any number of load balancers in any of your connected clouds, virtual machines (VMs), containers, and locations to distribute the load and keep your site agile and responsive.
More than just high scale load balancing, Snapt Nova automatically caches and optimizes websites and applications for lower latency and faster performance, and provides advanced application security that inspects every network packet to protect websites from hackers, denial-of-service, malware, data leaks, and more.
For further convenience and streamlined workflow, Snapt Nova even allows you to manage your load balancers and application firewalls from a single centralized UI, where you can get end-to-end visibility, health checking, and reporting for your whole network. As a result, you only need to go to one place to see what’s happening and to make any changes, making life easy for DevOps and IT teams everywhere.
As retail and other services move increasingly online, competitive brands cannot afford to be left behind with sub-par website performance. To stay relevant and capitalize on every sales opportunity, savvy businesses will look beyond sales and marketing. Now, with the help of Snapt, companies of all sizes and in all industries can deliver peak customer experiences with websites and apps that are fast, stable, and prepared to handle any influx of traffic.
