BLACKout FRIDAY

What is "BLACKout FRIDAY"?

Glad you asked! It's like Black Friday, but instead of thousands of new customers, there are thousands of lost sales. The millions upon millions of dollars spent each year during Black Friday and the sister day, Cyber Monday, is growing more and more due to the number of Internet-connected devices. Customers get into physical fighting, crazed spending sprees, and become loyal members of stores they've never heard of before.

It's an absolute MUST that you launch promotions, coupons, and announce your company participation in Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but that's not the point of this article. The point is, your site needs to be prepared. With $2 BILLION spent last year during Cyber Monday, people are flocking to online (and offline) deals like mad. Your physical storefront might be equipped (unlikely) to handle the influx of customers, but what about your online store?

Each and every year I watch dozens of websites strain and then crack under the pressure of online visitors. During the Black Friday/Cyber Monday craze, customers are not intentionally doing it, but they are essentially launching a DDoS attack on your site. One that cannot be stopped without closing your online doors. Even though it would be madness to close up shop on the biggest shopping days; what are you going to do when your site crashes and you see a connection error page?

The answer is amazingly simple: Dedicate resources to your website. If your current website is on a shared hosting plan with us, something that can handle approx. 4K of visitors, consider switching to a server. Our server plans are designed to handle around 2M visitors per month. Even better, if you need more resources, you can upgrade instantly! The plan is available in 4 different geographical locations to provide the quickest route to your country of residence.

Now, what happens if you have a promotion in place and are ready for 100,000 online shoppers? All of our dedicated servers are designed to handle up to 2 MILLION visitors per month by default... Of course all at one time may still crash even the best sites, but on a 1,000 Mbps connection, that means you can serve 200 visitors at the same moment all accessing a 5 MB site. The math is tricky, but lets say that it takes 5 minutes per order (and they are constantly loading your site from scratch), within 24 hours you should be able to allow for 57,600 orders!

With an average spending of $380 last year* that's $21,888,000 of sales that they could spend at your store. Now stop reading this article, grab a Dedicated Server, and start planning your online & offline promotions.

*http://www.statisticbrain.com/black-friday-yearly-spending/

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