Category: Productivity

According to a report from eBay, 27% of British consumers plan to begin their Christmas shopping earlier this year. This should come as a relief to the website manager – peaks in traffic could be one-quarter lower than normal, helping to reduce costs and the risks of the website crashing in December.

But don’t forget – baseline traffic is already above normal – and any additional increase could cause similar issues to those normally restricted to Christmas. It may be that you need to deploy a scalable website sooner to avoid the kind of performance issues that drive customers away.

Traditional websites are closely tied to the hardware on which they are installed. Once demand outstrips available resources, the website fails. The same is true of basic virtual servers which are also limited by assigned resources.

By reconfiguring the website to make use of cloud infrastructure however, you are far less likely to encounter these limitations. Cloud platforms like Microsoft Azure are built on an enormous pool of resources (RAM, disk space, bandwidth etc) that are shared between subscribers.

If your application begins to run out of available RAM, the platform automatically assigns more from pool to prevent a resource-related crash. This auto-scaling behaviour applies CPU power and disk storage too. Your applications should never run out of resources again.

Under a traditional website model you would need to buy additional redundant server hardware, hoping that you have specified enough to manage peaks in demand. This would be a large capital investment and the majority of those resources would remain unused for most of the year.

Moving to a cloud platform completely changes the proposition. You do not have to make any up-front capital spend, nor do you have to guesstimate a resource limit that you hope will cover demand. Instead you only ever pay for the resources your ecommerce website actually uses. December’s bill will of course be higher, but your website won’t crash because it ran out of RAM.

The fact that so much day-to-day business has moved online means that many websites are already under pressure. Any additional pre-Christmas load could begin to cause problems. And the December rush is completely unavoidable.

It makes sense to consider whether your current website needs to be migrated to the cloud sooner rather than later. Sub-optimal performance is one of the easiest ways to lose customers and revenue – so can you really afford not to take action before the rush begins?

Ready to talk? Give us a call and we’ll talk you through your website options.

Jas spent 25 years as a principal consultant and database specialist at Capgemini where she led digital transformation and migration projects for Public Sector Services, the Insurance and Property industry, DHL, Citibank, General Motors Acceptance Corporation, Nationwide Building Society, Swansea County Council and more. Jas now manages our operations and development team to ensure the highest level of quality for your development project.

Whilst there is a huge amount of change taking place within the business landscape, we thought we would take a minute to highlight a few steps you can take to generate new business in 2017.

Create A Video To Explain Your Business

Video is going to dominate social media and online marketing in 2017.

The easiest way for your business to join the revolution is to feature an explainer video on your website explaining in no more than 90 seconds who you are and what your company does.

These videos are powerful as they make your website active rather than passive, a concept we preach to clients. Google and your clients love active websites and get bored or skip passive ones that cannot hold their attention.

Hold An Event

Building trust is an incredibly important part of generating new business. Events for new products or even just to network can have a huge impact on your reputation and be a powerful tool to create new businesses.

Holding an event could be the perfect way to kick start 2017 for your business.

Reach Out To Old Contacts

Over time you may have had customers or prospects where communication wound down or they have not been in contact recently.

It may even be existing customers or clients that with the right conversation may be open to buying more from you in the future.

The New Year is the perfect time to reach out to them and rebuild the relationship. Whether this is via a phone call an email or even a newsletter to your entire list, don’t forget that often the biggest value in marketing is to the people you already know.

Digital marketing and tech specialist Anoop is a well-known figure in the Harrow and North London community. Currently the Operations Director for Aspiring Panda, the company uses cloud and development expertise to solve some of the toughest business challenges – which has recently included consulting with East African nations to provide sustainable farming.