Who of us marketers hasn’t dreamt of a campaign going viral? But, to prevent that dream from turning into a nightmare, your website needs to be prepared for an unpredicted traffic spike. This is where cloud caching technology comes to the rescue.
The Internet has evolved into way more than a sales channel. It helps us connect with people at every stage of the customer journey. Although many consumers start their journey through social media channels, websites and mobile apps are their destinations. We build our campaigns and content to generate as many inbound leads as possible and to drive potential buyers to our sites. With the right mix of creativity and luck, a campaign can become a success and go viral.
A dream come true?
To many a marketer, this sounds like a dream come true, no doubt. But it also deserves a word of caution: when your company’s website can’t cope with huge spikes in traffic, that viral dream can quickly descend into a nightmare involving media backlash, Twitter shaming and lost business.
Fortunately, there is a technical solution. Disruptive FAANG companies (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google) have used it for nearly a decade: intelligent web caching. It ensures that websites, content delivery networks (CDNs) or applications can cope with high traffic volumes and deliver content as fast as possible.
Just like an ordinary web server, a cache intercepts all web requests before they reach a company’s backend server farm. That means the company server doesn’t have to reproduce multiple impressions of the same content and the next user can view the content without experiencing a delay. By doing so, it is able to serve up to tens of thousands of consecutive requests per second, speeding up website performance and reducing backend server load dramatically.
But as your savvy sysadmin knows, “all that glitters is not gold” and he or she might argue that planning infrastructure based on traffic peaks that “might” happen isn’t high on their priority list. Even if you could predict these peaks, your CIO is likely to say that the company can’t afford to invest in hardware that’s underutilized the 90+ percent of the time when it’s ‘business as usual’.
The good news is, that there is a technical fix for that as well. Using intelligent caching solutions in the cloud lets companies scale and provision computing power according to their needs. Your sysadmin will value that these solutions are robust, stable and scalable. As a cloud deployment, intelligent caching frees organizations from having to invest in and maintain physical servers/hardware - a factor that’s CIO budget-friendly.
The bottom line is that intelligent caching in the cloud will ensure your viral success. It protects your company's resources too as you don’t have to waste money upfront on resources you won’t fully utilise. So, prepare for future success and invest in intelligent caching in the cloud. Prepare to go viral!
By Hildur Smaradottir, vice president for global marketing at Varnish Software
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