Seasonal Demand? How Renting Servers Can Help You Manage Traffic Spikes
Introduction
In an increasingly digital world, keeping an online presence has become a challenge for businesses worldwide. Given the popularity of e-commerce, social media, cloud computing, and other IT trends, more and more consumers are using online services. In turn, overloading the system with this high amount of requests causes traffic spikes which are a bane to businesses without infrastructure sufficient to handle the load. This blog post will break down the idea of seasonal demand and consider how renting servers can keep you safe from the high tide of internet traffic.
Understanding
Seasonal demand refers to the fluctuations in demand for a product or service that arise due to seasonal or periodical factors. Some common reasons for that in terms of online services are:
- Holidays and special events. For instance, people shop more during Black Friday or Cyber Monday, while Christmas celebrations involve a lot of online shopping.
- Seasonal. When it comes to weather occurrences such as summer vacations or winter holidays, the demand for certain services might go up.
- Marketing campaigns. Launching a social media context or starting a promotion can instantly double your website traffic.
Challenges
Managing traffic spikes is a challenge, as the following issues arise:
- Server crashes, under the excessive load due to a large number of requests, the server will crash and your customers will receive an error when trying to enter the website.
- Page load slowdown. The server might handle the number of requests being sent to it, but browsing will become slow, which will scare new customers away.
- High risk of data loss. The server has simply run out of storage space, and data has become missing or corrupted, making it impossible to use the business continuity plan.
Solutions
- Scalability: you can upscale or downscale the server whenever it is needed to provide the necessary resources.
- Flexibility: servers come in different shapes and sizes, and one can adjust them as needed.
- Affordability: you don’t have to manage the equipment or pay for the hardware since the datacenter provides that.