It worked – all your marketing efforts bear fruit and your competition site has gone viral. People are coming in to play Spot the ball or other skilled games and they bring their friends with them. They spend time and money on your site, engage with your brand and the retention is low. It would be a shame if the server would overload, the I/O spiked and it went down and all of the visitors would scatter back to where they came from.
If you’re a marketer or competition site organizer – take a moment to calm your anxiety and wipe the cold sweat off your brow. There is a way to prevent this catastrophe and make sure that the site is stable no matter where the traffic is coming from.
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) provides alternative server nodes for users to access your competition site. These nodes spread throughout the world, so that the closest one to the user accepts and delivers the request, ensuring faster response and download time of content due to reduced latency and increased stability. The hosted skilled game and the volume of traffic it can attract puts a significant strain on the servers, increases the latency and the loading speeds and nobody wants those.
When you ask your users to use their skills and pinpoint the ball on the picture and promise a reward for that, they expect a fair competition. Access restrictions and errors in the site’s operation rob the audience of the fair opportunity to participate and ruin the user experience for them (and inadvertently – their friends and family, whom they will not invite or refer).
This is an often-overlooked solution since a lot of companies erroneously assume that CDN reserved only for those who expect a Facebook or Amazon volume of traffic and they can hold anything smaller than that themselves. Instead, think of the user experience – i.e. global CDN allows users from the Rochdale to access the spot the ball competition from a much closer source rather than reaching across the Atlantic to load your site. And people in Rochdale want their sites loaded as fast and have as little patience for downtime, 404 errors and loading times as those in London and New York.
Caring for the customer experience and your marketer's greying hair should be part of the business' strategy. Expecting and planning for surges in traffic can be difficult and includes a lot of guesswork, that's why it is better to be safe than sorry. And to go to Tentacle Solutions – a team of professionals who know how to deal with any crises that may arise with your competition site.
It is an established practice for reliable software houses to guide you through the preparation and application of CDN and other measures that would protect your competition and your users from unnecessary stress the next time your site goes viral overnight.
Access restrictions and errors in the site’s operation rob the audience of the fair opportunity to participate and ruin the user experience