The peak shopping season doesn’t stop at Cyber Monday. While shopping events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday are expected to be busy, the long-tail effect of these peak days continues into the festive season.
With high demand during this time, it is tricky to navigate how much website bandwidth will be needed; investing in too much can impact a business’ bottom line by investing revenue on unused resources, but not enough could also lead to a poor user experience (UX).
In this article, we look at two SMBs that have solved the bandwidth conundrum through using Autonomous from Cloudways, a solution that automatically adjusts a website’s bandwidth based on demand, so it is always optimised for a great UX. To help during this high traffic season, Cloudways is currently running a promotion to get 40% off cloud managed web hosting services for 4 months! You can access the deal here.
Delivering Optimised Experiences For Global Retailers
An example of how auto-scaling bandwidth can help lead to efficiencies in e-Commerce comes from an agency named Local & Co., which helps SMBs scale and grow their online stores. However, while there is a great opportunity for growth available, with that comes a big challenge: ensuring websites can handle surging traffic without slowing down or crashing.
After being introduced to Cloudways’ Autonomous product, Local & Co. Was able to offer its clients significant enhancements across:
Scalability and Flexibility: Autonomous enables scaling up, eliminating the fears of handling high-traffic websites. Websites perform well even during peak traffic. This flexibility allows Local & Co. to handle projects of any size or complexity easily.
Cost-Efficiency: By using Autonomous’ automated resource allocation, the business only pays for what it actually uses, saving money. This smart approach to managing resources helps us offer competitive prices to its clients, while still making a good profit.
Reliability and Uptime: Thanks to Autonomous’ features like high availability and load balancing, Local & Co.’s website stays up and always runs smoothly. This means their clients can count on their websites being accessible 24/7, which builds trust in Local & Co.’s services.
Global Reach: By collaborating with Autonomous and Cloudflare’s CDN, Local & Co. can quickly deliver content to users worldwide with low latency. This wider reach has enabled it to take on international clients and projects and improved its users’ website performance.
Security: Autonomous’ strong security measures, including DDoS protection, strengthen its hosted websites against cyber threats. This assurance is particularly important for clients handling sensitive customer data or online transactions.
Streamlined Operations: Autonomous’ automated features, such as server scaling and real-time monitoring, have reduced manual workload, allowing Local & Co.’s team to focus more on value-added tasks like website development, optimisation, and client support.
Flying To Scaling Success
Hot off the back of Travel Tuesday, our first case study comes from Spitfire Competitions, a business that runs monthly competitions for people from the UK and Ireland to win a flight in a WWII Spitfire. Spitfire Competitions was encountering challenges delivering a smooth online entry process for its customers. Frequent website crashes during peak competition periods frustrated potential participants, jeopardising the company’s mission to make this unique opportunity accessible to all.
Initially, to prevent the company’s server from becoming overwhelmed, the team manually split customer contact lists for email, SMS, and marketing campaigns into multiple files, to be sent out at different times to avoid a lot of simultaneous users to the site at once.
However, this process was not only inefficient, but it also diverted valuable resources away from more strategic tasks, such as improving the competition offerings or enhancing customer engagement strategies, resulting in inefficient marketing delivery.
Sending marketing campaigns in staggered batches to avoid overloading the server likely compromised engagement rates, as timing is crucial in marketing, and being unable to reach the entire audience simultaneously could have resulted in missed opportunities and decreased effectiveness of promotional efforts.
Not only this but managing multiple files and schedules also increased the complexity of operations and the likelihood of errors. Mistakes in segmentation, timing, or content could have led to customer dissatisfaction or confusion, potentially affecting the brand’s reputation. To make its web hosting strong and improve website reliability, particularly during high-traffic competition entry periods, Spitfire Competitions transitioned to Cloudways Autonomous to auto-scale based on demand
Implementing the solution has helped Spitfire Competitions meet its goal to make the thrill of flying in a Spitfire accessible to as many people as possible without the high costs usually involved. It aims to grow the community of participants each month, increasing the number of entries and, by extension, the number of people who get to experience this unique adventure.
They want to double their user base within the next year by working on reaching more people across the UK and Ireland through targeted marketing campaigns and social media engagement. After switching to Cloudways Autonomous, Spitfire is able to focus on adding more variety of experiences related to aviation and adventure to give its users more reasons to keep coming back.
If you would like to access Cloudways’ 40% off cloud managed web hosting services for 4 months, please visit www.cloudways.com
