Most companies have now come to rely on their website, downtime is no longer an option, even for the smallest sites. However no matter how engaging, advanced or user friendly a site is, it can be taken down by the simplest of things. It’s always worth bearing the following in mind when developing a new site.
Ensure your site caches or catches any errors were you include 3rd party content.
We often see sites stop loading when a 3rd party asset they include has an issue, rendering the whole site unusable, therefore its always wise to either have some error handling around this with a short timeout, or cache the asset so if the 3rd party has any issue your site will continue to function.
Have an option for high traffic periods.
Even if this is a static HTML page as your homepage, or the option to upgrade your hosting at short notice, its always wise to have a plan b. If you manage to get an influx of traffic you want to be able to take advantage of it, its unlikely people will try again later, especially in the case of ‘dragons den’ type exposure.
Load and Vulnerability test your site.
While this may cost a few pounds, it can help identify not only weak spots for hackers, but also inefficient code or elements that may cause problems down the line as the traffic to your site ramps up.
We host many high traffic sites, and have assisted them with load testing, vulnerability testing and also a scalable hosting solution to help deal with peaks in demand. Using our UK based VMware platform we can scale demand up and down to cope with seasonal traffic.
If you have any questions or queries, please email sales@catalyst2.com and one of the team would be happy to help.
