Is your app ready for Black Friday

With the increasing use of mobile devices for online shopping, a major share of every wallet is now going to online retailers. The convenience of shopping anytime; anywhere perfectly suits the busy, on-the-go generation that is giving eCommerce businesses a big boost. Despite this reality, more than 70% of SMBs do not have their websites ready for a sudden rise in traffic and fail to tackle a huge volume of shoppers during seasonal peaks and following promotional campaigns. Server optimization is the key to making the most of the incoming traffic without experiencing a website slowdown or crash.

Use these 5 tips to ensure that your website offers instant access on any device, remains up around the clock, and provides a glitch-free shopping experience even during the Black Friday Bonanza:

1.) Perform Database Failover to Maintain HA

Your database should facilitate a failover but a real value addition is when that failover is transparent to the application. Database load balancing software works with the database failover mechanism to make it invisible at the app tier by employing query queuing technology to avoid application errors during database failover.

2.) Schedule Zero-downtime Maintenance for Improved Flexibility

Database maintenance is a disruptive activity because it is complicated, time-consuming, requires several system administrators to ensure smooth execution and also needs planned downtime which is not desirable for online retailers. The process requires redeployment of business-critical apps, so to ensure that the environment is restored to optimal efficiency following maintenance, most businesses schedule maintenance windows outside business hours. Since eCommerce businesses need to remain up and accessible 24X7X365, they simply cannot afford to put up maintenance alerts even at 11 p.m. on a Saturday night. Database load balancing software lets you create a resilient and highly available architecture to facilitate database patching without requiring downtime. It enables the application to talk to other servers in the database cluster to facilitate an uninterrupted flow of traffic even as you continue to perform maintenance.

3.) Scale your Infrastructure to Accommodate Unexpected Traffic Surges

eCommerce stores invite an avalanche of crazy shoppers during Black Friday. If the existing server setup is unable to handle the sudden traffic spike, performance degrades, increasing the risk of crashing. Fortunately you can enable your eCommerce app to achieve dramatic improvements in database performance by deploying database load balancing. It facilitates instant scalability just before the traffic spikes without needing any modifications at the app level. A load balancer gives you complete flexibility to scale up and down as the traffic spikes and subsides.

4.) Enable ACID Compliant Caching for Enhanced Website Performance

An eCommerce app hosts significant data on the products for sale and tracks the shopping cart data for every single user. Loading this information into web pages puts significant load on the database throughout a customer's visit. Often, these database queries will slow web page performance, which can drive your visitors away. eCommerce databases need to maintain 100% uptime and fast performance even as they load pages of product info and validate every user before processing any transaction. If you want to speed website performance, cache catalog data as well as shopping cart data, you can use database load balancing software that lets you cache query responses, automatically flushing the cache when any content changes. A database load balancer couples SQL query caching technology with automated cache invalidation, enabling online retailers to handle a high volume of traffic while maintaining high availability and data security.

5.) Monitor Access Control and Logging to Find and Fix Issues Faster

When enterprises have a centralized point for monitoring and managing access control and logging, they can compare and analyze access patterns in real-time when a data breach occurs, and fix issues before they impact the end-user experience adversely. The only technology that offers granular visibility into all reads, writes, connections, and transactions without inviting any performance overhead is database load balancing software. This software not only lets you find and fix anomalies in a fraction of the time you typically take but also rotates logs if storage space is limited while preserving your data.

Provide an Excellent Shopping Experience with Database Load Balancing

Enterprises can deploy database load balancing software transparently between their SQL database infrastructure and eCommerce applications to ensure a transparent failover, on-demand patching, a fast and hassle-free scale out and improved responsiveness without making any changes at the app level or rewriting a single line of code. A load balancer brings you the ability to ensure 100% uptime and data consistency even on Black Friday. It is the easiest way to make sure that your website withstands any amount of traffic and also rakes in the dough that comes along.

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