Websites buckle under consumer pressure

Websites around the country buckled under the pressure of Black Friday sales, leaving consumers frustrated.

According to David Nel managing partner at Tangent Solutions, a Microsoft Gold Partner, the sites crashed because the infrastructure they are built or the servers could not process the large amount of requests being sent.

Dion Wired, Takealot.com, Incredible Connection, Virgin Active and Toys R Us were just some of the websites that were hit with outages.

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Nel advised businesses to invest in cloud solutions such as Azure, which are scalable and dynamic. “With online shopping becoming more prominent in South Africa, businesses cannot afford not to look ahead and use the latest in technology.”

“As of 8am this morning, CTM, which is one of our clients that uses Azure, had processed about R330 000 worth of orders. The site was adjusting to the needs of consumers,” Nel said.

“Azure’s ability for elastic infrastructure is a game changer for digital campaigns and e-Commerce from an IT perspective.”

Nel explained that with server based websites, the infrastructure is scaled to cater for a projected worst case scenario. This is time-consuming and could still not be sufficient – not to mention the high costs involved. “Infrastructure cannot be scaled resulting in the campaign website crashing. This is evidenced by the unreliability of websites during campaigns such as Black Friday.”

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With elasticity, sites automatically scale to manage the increased traffic based on triggers such as CPU (Central processing unit) or Memory usage, the scaling of the sites allows the load to be balanced across multiple instances of the site, ensuring no downtime and no degradation of service due to load on the server.

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