Any business has its inherent risks. However running a competition site puts on an extra strain on the owners; constantly maintaining the honesty and trustworthy of the site to your users. This includes the security your user’s data. This may seem more than enough for any software company to handle, but when you add in trolls, professional hackers and technical failures then the workload “glass” simply overflows.

If any of the above does happen to your competition site then it often results in negative press which can feel as if it is impossible to get out of the trouble.

How does a company sort such a problem in this risky business?

Hire professionals with decades of experience in handling competition sites.

One doesn’t have to go far to see the scale of trouble when one of the “too-big-to-fail” CDN providers go down. Cloudflare sustained a horrible blow – it went down last week and took a massive number of their clients with them. Millions of customers experienced a heart attack when they got a “502 Bad Gateway” error page after, ironically enough, a routine security test went wrong and deployed a new rule globally that made all the Cloudfare server CPUs peak at 100% load and shut themselves down together with a significant part of the internet.

The safety-net that should’ve caught and predicted such an outcome didn’t work. Why? Cloudflare themselves don’t know and are still investigating into it however had to apologize to their customers for the whole situation. This situation gets progressively worse when the marketing campaign or the entire business depends on the transparency of your games and any trouble is amplified by the trolls.

Now, imagine what would be racing through your Spot the Ball players’ minds if such thing happened when they were in the middle of the game or just finished their purchased and wanted to play.

There is not much one can do about systemic failures of technology and the bad publicity that may surround it. However having, by your side, an experienced IT team like Tentacle Solutions, who have previously handled crises for their clients, can be a good start. Tentacle know how to minimize the damage, back everything up, quickly restore the data, and keep it all up and running.

It takes years of practice and training to be ready for a situation like the one with Cloudflare and it takes a lot of nerve and character to withstand the stress of dealing with the trouble with dignity and professionalism – seeing those characteristics in a company like Tentacle Solutions reassures their clients and their users that they will handle everything even if something goes wrong.

Having by your side an experienced IT team is priceless.