Case Study: Host a Project to manage the Black Friday of an e-commerce

These are certainly events that trigger an increase in traffic on your sites, especially if it concerns e-commerce and if you deal with different types of products with more or less large offers.

In this Case Study we really want to present you with a real case of successful e-commerce and how we faced, together with the customer, #BlackFriday2017, which took place on November 24th.

INDEX The Customer: e-commerce site created with Prestashop Needs and Requirements Required The Solution: Project Host Scalable Infrastructure and Constant Monitoring Customer Results in Numbers Conclusions Contact us

THE CUSTOMER: E-COMMERCE SITE CREATED WITH PRESTASHOP The success case covered concerns the website created with Prestashop. It is an e-commerce that deals with IT, electronics and telephony products of various kinds. You can imagine how an online store of this type could focus on an extraordinary shopping day like Black Friday to show its offers and increase traffic, sales and turnover.

NEEDS AND REQUIREMENTS Given the type of e-commerce it is quite easy to understand that the days of Black Friday and Cyber Monday would have been fundamental for the sale of products at a discounted and advantageous price.

The client had important objectives to achieve:

Prevent the site from going down during an increase in traffic expected on these two particular days (as had happened in the past with a traditional dedicated server solution);

Exceed 1000 orders in a single day (obviously aiming for Friday 24 November 2017);

Aim to reach 1000 concurrent users.

The first requirement to achieve objective number one was to identify a hosting solution that would keep the e-commerce site online, especially during the high number of simultaneous accesses that we expected to obtain.

By calculating the individual days, it was necessary to guarantee a dynamic, high-performance and scalable infrastructure for 24 hours of numerous simultaneous accesses, with as many requests to satisfy.

This requirement was obviously also necessary to be able to achieve objective number two linked to the number of sales and the increase in the customer's turnover.

THE SOLUTION: PROJECT HOST To allow the customer to achieve his goals by selling products on his e-commerce during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, we had to configure a solution that was scalable, high-performance and secure at the same time.

The solution we identified for the customer was to create a PROJECT HOST. It is a solution that allows you to host applications and CMS such as Prestashop, installed on websites that have a high number of monthly and, above all, simultaneous accesses, with particular attention to the response performance of the website and navigation security.

The key points of HOST A PROJECT are in fact:

PROJECT HOST SCALABILITY guarantees a number of monthly visitors ranging from 50,000 to millions of users;

DATA REPLICATION The configuration of our infrastructure allows us to replicate all of our customers' data within our 3 proprietary data centers. This guarantees all Host customers business continuity even in the event of extraordinary maintenance, natural disaster or human error in one of the data centers;

MANAGED HOSTING The complete management of the infrastructure is the sole responsibility of the Host, unlike a dedicated server which instead requires the presence of systems engineers at the end customer to manage any traffic peaks and increase in resources. In this way the end customer will not have to worry about the infrastructure at all having complete support from an entire company that takes care of just this;

BILLING BASED ON REAL VISITS Above a certain level of monthly visits, billing is calculated on the actual sessions obtained from the website and not on the resources provided. This allows you to eliminate a further worry for the customer who already knows from the start how much the actual visits obtained from the site will be invoiced. It is a scalable solution also from an economic point of view and the customer will pay only and exclusively for the real traffic guaranteed by the service.

In the case in question, the site is created using Prestashop which has been deployed in a fully managed, but highly customizable and customer-controlled environment. The PROJECT HOST solution, thanks to access to a console via SSH, allows you to operate in complete autonomy on the platform.

The scalability of the PROJECT HOST solution created for the customer also presents advantages from an economic point of view. The innovative billing system developed is in fact based on the actual visits obtained from the customer's website. How do you get this billing based on real visits?

an algorithm analyzes the unique visits obtained in the 24 hours taken into consideration (in this specific case those of Friday 24 November 2017, the date of this year's Black Friday);

data integration with Google Analytics makes a cross comparison on the data obtained by the algorithm.

Thanks to these two analysis systems we were able to be very precise and transparent about the amount to be charged to the customer for the actual use of the platform.

In order to carry out precise and transparent invoicing, a limit of initial visits is identified during the offer phase to the customer. In the case of sudden or planned traffic peaks (as in the case of Black Friday or any advertising campaigns), a scalable infrastructure reacts, guaranteeing temporary or lasting success.

As for the example we are covering in this Case Study, success was guaranteed and sustained throughout the Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend. If during the peak traffic the limit of visits established in the initial offer is exceeded, a clear rate is applied, agreed with the customer and absolutely controllable only for the number of excess visits.

SCALABLE INFRASTRUCTURE AND CONSTANT MONITORING The infrastructure that hosts the e-commerce site covered in this Case Study (and the sites of all our customers and partners) is replicated on two geographically distinct data centers:

This type of configuration allows us to guarantee our customers business continuity in the event of a serious breakdown, maintenance, natural disaster or human error in one of the two facilities. Data protection is a fundamental aspect of our work, which is why we have decided to guarantee maximum security to our customers in the configuration of our data centers, which are structured as follows:

The PROJECT HOST solution presented in this case study is monitored 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, in the following ways:

every minute the status of all the services that make up the infrastructure is checked;

the performance of the websites hosted on the project infrastructure is measured every 10 minutes;

access and database logs are programmatically analyzed to recommend security and speed optimizations to customers;

During events such as Black Friday, part of Host's staff is dedicated to following project-based customer traffic increases.

All monitoring work has the aim of intervening preventively in the event of malfunctions and proactively alerting customers before any disruption occurs.

CUSTOMER RESULTS IN NUMBERS The customer, during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend of last November, managed to achieve and exceed the objectives he had set himself, thanks to the PROJECT HOST solution that we configured for him.

Below are the graphs taken directly from the customer's Google Analytics account which show one of the many traffic peaks obtained by the site during Black Friday 2017 (Friday 24 November):

The site recorded a constant average of 800 concurrent users on the site in just the 24 hours of Black Friday, around 450 page views per minute and, approximately, 15 per second.

Compared to a "normal" Friday, the site recorded an increase of +326% in users and +1087.23% in sales, achieving and far exceeding the objectives that the client had set.

Below are the details taken from the site's Google Analytics account which show the comparison between the traffic obtained on Friday 24 November 2017 and the previous Friday (11/17):

We also made the same comparison on the traffic received by the website covered by this case study for the entire Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend (compared to the normal previous weekend):

Compared to the previous weekend, sessions increased by almost +140%.

The proposed HOST PROJECT solution satisfied all the requirements requested by the customer and the Host staff was able to monitor the situation for the entire period analyzed.

Below are the graphs of loading speed and response times of the site during the day of November 24, 2017:

CONCLUSIONS The PROJECT HOST solution offered to this customer is particularly convenient for any type of e-commerce or news and events sites which usually find themselves managing a constant number of visits over time and, on some particular already scheduled occasions, foresee traffic peaks and therefore require a platform that reacts immediately to these events and is ready to guarantee their success.

More traditional solutions, normally proposed in these cases as cloud servers or dedicated servers, force the managers of these web projects to buy resources to guarantee the necessary performance, but how many resources are we talking about? It is practically impossible to accurately predict the resources needed in these particular moments of increased traffic and requests, which is why with PROJECT HOST no one will have to ask themselves this question anymore or even worry about sizing their infrastructure, because... we'll take care of it!

CONTACT US If you want to learn more about the PROJECT HOST solution and receive a personalized, no-obligation quote for your web project, you can contact us via e-mail or on our TOLL-FREE NUMBER which answers 7 days a week

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