Your Website Has to Be Ready for Anything!

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again – your website has to be ready for anything; especially if you want to avoid dreaded website downtime. Yes, it is true that there are times when website downtime is inevitable. There are, however, also instances in which you can avoid downtime by making sure that you have sufficient resources as far as your hosting plan and/or servers go. Unfortunately, the Fantasy Premier League didn’t seem to heed the advice we’ve given over and over again.

When an Expected Traffic Spike is Imminent, Your Servers Better Be Ready to Go

Sometimes DDoS attacks are the reason that traffic brings down a website. Sometimes it’s due to the fact that there is a spike in actual visitors who want to access your site. This is what happened this weekend with the Fantasy Premier League website.

Fantasy Premier League, according to the company’s site, is the official fantasy game of the Premier League with more than 2.5 million players. You’d think such a large website would have its ducks in a row. That doesn’t seem to be the case. This Sunday, a day before the big games, as users tried desperately to access the site to drop players from their Fantasy Premier League teams and change their rosters, the site was unavailable.

Fantasy Premier League tweeted, “Website down due to the amount of people dropping #arsenal players from their #fpl team.” At Alertra, we feel that a site should be ready for this type of traffic spike before a site goes down. Unfortunately, not all sites are. The Fantasy Premier League site is just one example of this fact – and it left users of the site quite frustrated.

Reputation Isn’t Something That Can Be Bought

Remember, when it comes to your website’s reputation, it is one thing that you can’t buy. You have to work for it. Having a site go down during a critical time (and this was a critical time) is just asking for frustrated customers and a hit to your business’s rep. Fantasy Premier League’s clientele wasn’t happy with recent downtime. One Twitter member stated, “How is fantasy premier league website down? #grr.”

Remember, whatever you do, make sure your site’s hosting and/or servers can keep up with your expected traffic levels and then some. It’s better to have too much than too little when it comes to bandwidth and website capabilities. Remember, your site’s reputation may be counting on your ability to anticipate traffic patterns and ensure that your site accommodates them. Otherwise, your site may go down when your visitors need it most.