PEER 1 Hosting, an international online business hosting provider, has recently released a press communique that warns ecommerce sites to be prepared for the high traffic levels expected online this Christmas. The UK branch of the hosting company has shared survey results that show an increase in online spending with a predicted £8.1bn in the lead up to Christmas, according to Verdict Research.
Beginning Cyber-Monday to December 6th, online retailers expect online shopping to break all previous records. The hosting company is basing these predictions on a Smooch.com survey based on 11,037 responses from members aged between 18 and 105 years.
The statistics suggest that consumers will spend more time buying online this year, which could translate, for some businesses, into heavy loads of traffic. For businesses without a reliable hosting package, traffic means trouble: slow server loads, crashes, higher bandwidth costs, etc. Sites that fail at this time will cause their owners a huge amount of lost revenue. With the potential to purchase goods from various outlets, if one site fails, consumers are most likely to purchase the wanted item elsewhere:
“Retailers need to be ready this year for Christmas, and cope with big spikes in activity – slow page loading times or site crashes mean lost customers,” said Dominic Monkhouse, UK MD at PEER 1 Hosting. “It’s business critical for ecommerce sites to continue to perform at their optimum rate at the busiest time of the year, and working with a scalable hosting provider means there’s no need to invest in a lot of extra capacity that won’t be needed for the majority of the year.“
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