Black Friday: What To Expect from your Magento Hosting Partner

Black Friday Banner

As you approach a critical operational period like Black Friday, you may likely have invested substantial time, resources and effort to ensure the key trading period runs as successfully as possible, delivering a healthy return on investment.  

From an operational perspective, the measure of success on Black Friday can often be defined by how uneventful it is. The perfect scenario is that everything runs smoothly, with no unwanted disruptions or headaches.

As with many projects, the key to this success lies in planning and preparation –  and your Magento & Adobe Commerce hosting partner plays a crucial role in this. So what should you expect from them?

Any hosting partner worth its salt should be working with its clients to support them in the run-up to, during and after this critical trading period. They should be taking a proactive and tailored approach, guiding you through data-driven capacity planning, and delivering real-time, helpful support.

Delivering this level of structured hosting support enables your brand to achieve:

  • Greater predictability in operations
  • Accurate demand management
  • Flexibility to make last-minute adjustments if needed

Akoova follows these steps with its clients throughout the Black Friday period, and we are pleased to share these with you.

One step at a time …

Start by arranging for up-to-date load testing well ahead of Black Friday. There are many excellent load-testing providers available and so choose the one that best fits your business model. 

Completing an up-to-date load testing exercise will allow you to enter the planning stage of Black Friday with a clear understanding of your ecommerce site’s existing capacity.  

Your hosting partner should work together with your development team to understand the results of the load test. Conducting the testing early in the process gives developers time to optimise your site in response to the findings, which helps to reduce the amount of infrastructure required to support the demand peak – and in itself, brings down cost.

Around six weeks before Black Friday, your hosting partner should be proactively reaching out to gather key information about your plans. Key questions that they should be asking include:

  • What are your Black Friday marketing plans?
  • What are the key dates?
  • Do you plan to have a code freeze or a change freeze? If so, when?

At Akoova, we start these discussions with our clients in mid-October. Starting the discussions early allows ample time to manage any unforeseen challenges and last-minute strategy changes.

This is, of course, a two-way conversation. 

  • Ask your hosting provider whether you currently have enough resources to manage the anticipated increase in traffic. If not, what plans do they have to manage this?
  • Find out how responsive your hosting partner is to changes in capacity demand. Some providers require between 48 hours to 5 days’ notice to scale resources. They choose to only fast-track your request if they deem it to be an emergency situation, and to qualify, your site needs to be ‘completely non-functional’ or its performance ‘severely degraded’. This is not good practice. Therefore, it’s important to be aware of their responsiveness up-front.
  • You need to understand from your hosting partner what the level of disruption your site will experience during scaling. If it’s going to result in your site going down for four hours, you need to be aware.

At Akoova, we’re able to scale our client’s database with minimal disruption – usually around one minute.

However, we recognise that one minute’s disruption can still impact your business, which is why we collaborate closely to schedule this work during agreed times that cause the least interruption. Additionally, tasks such as adding or increasing the size of web servers, or adding cache, can be completed with zero downtime.

Does your hosting partner retain and analyse data from previous Black Friday events? 

Sadly, many don’t, despite this being an essential part of planning and forecasting demand for the upcoming period. Therefore, you need to be aware.

Enabling the ability to reference and analyse last year’s Black Friday performance data helps to facilitate an open discussion about expected year-on-year (YoY) variations. Your hosting partner should be addressing the following points:

  • How did your site perform last year?
  • Were you over or under capacity?
  • What YoY % variances of traffic are expected based on market conditions, business forecasts or other factors?

Akoova believes it is imperative to retain and review our client’s performance metrics from previous years. This data-driven approach enables us to offer evidence-based recommendations.

Your hosting partner should be offering critical advice to ensure your Black Friday trading period runs as smoothly as possible. This includes:

  • Minimising non-essential configuration changes on peak days
  • Freezing resource-intensive tasks, such as running large sales reports during high-traffic periods

At this stage, your hosting partner should be providing you with key information and confident recommendations, including:

  • How much additional resource your site will need
  • Optimal times for configuration changes
  • Support plans going forward

In the course of your conversations with your hosting partner regarding capacity planning, there are some things you should consider and address:

Over-compensate on resources… but then adjust

Black Friday offers just one chance to execute a successful marketing campaign. If your site slows down – or worse, crashes – customers may leave and not come back. 

Therefore, to maximise your return on investment, it’s wise to initially err on the side of caution, over-provision resources … and then scale back later as needed once the demand stabilises.

Flexible resource management

All ecommerce brands are unique. Whilst some brands may require increased capacity during the entire duration of the Black Friday campaign, others may only require it during certain days or times, depending on their trading patterns.

It is bad practice for a hosting partner to insist on booking increased resources for the entire period if this is not required by their client. 

Instead, they should have the capability to fit the provision of upscaling and downscaling around the client’s requirements, ensuring cost efficiency without compromising on performance.  

Avoid resource overflow limitations by embracing cloud flexibility

Another bad practice that we see with some cloud hosting partner is an insistence on limiting resource overflow, meaning that if their client doesn’t request additional resources early enough, it’s not allocated to them when they need it.

One of the many advantages of hyperscaler cloud hosting, such as AWS, is the unlimited capacity – resources should be readily available as and when you need them, not restricted on a first-come-first-serve basis.

Understanding the limits of auto-scaling

Auto-scaling can be a great tool for managing typical fluctuations in traffic throughout the day but it’s not always the best option for high-demand events like Black Friday. Here’s why:

Auto-scaling reacts to traffic spikes, triggering the addition of resources once a certain threshold is surpassed. It acts as a reliable safety net, allowing you to optimise costs during normal operations. 

However, it’s a reactive process, meaning that additional resources may not be available until many minutes after your site is overloaded. During a business-critical event like Black Friday, where traffic can skyrocket quickly, this delay could mean your most eager customers – the people responding most quickly to your marketing – are the ones who will suffer performance issues such as slow site loading or even temporary downtime.

In contrast, proactive capacity planning – ensuring that ample resources are available ahead of time – offers a better approach for peak events. 

This is why, at Akoova, we advocate scaling up resources ahead of Black Friday to avoid any delays. This approach guarantees your site can handle a sudden influx of traffic without disruption.

Flexibility for Last-Minute Changes

Plans can change as you get closer to Black Friday. Perhaps you extend your marketing campaign, start earlier, or need more resources than anticipated. Flexibility is crucial in such cases.

By engaging in early conversations with your hosting partner, you position yourself well, giving ample time for strategic adjustments to your marketing plans. However, with the best will in the world, some changes may come at the very last minute – even within 24 hours before going live.

Your hosting partner should be able to accommodate these last-minute changes. For example, at Akoova, we can add additional web servers within 30 minutes (although we encourage our clients to give a few hours’ notice to ensure everything runs smoothly).

You’ve done the planning and now it’s time to go live with your Black Friday marketing campaign – but your hosting partner’s work isn’t finished there. 

Real-time monitoring

When required, they should be actively monitoring your site in real-time, ready to make adjustments as and when needed to prevent any issues.

There may be occasions when your hosting partner needs to make urgent adjustments to the scaling of the database. In this scenario, your partner should be able to complete this with a minimal amount of lead time. For example, at Akoova, we can scale the database with just 30 minutes’ notice if required.

Immediate support

Immediate and direct support from your hosting partner should be a standard part of their service. Rather than battling time-wasting ticketing systems, having instant access to senior engineers via a dedicated Slack channel ensures that any issues can be resolved swiftly.

While this level of support is essential for everyday operations, it becomes even more critical during high-traffic events like Black Friday. 

At Akoova, we provide this level of real-time support to our clients as business as usual because cloud hosting is mission-critical; we strongly believe it’s imperative to providing our clients peace of mind and confidence.

Step 7: Post-Event Review and Optimisation

Once Black Friday has passed, your hosting provider should help you scale down resources and assess the overall performance, providing observations and recommendations. They should be addressing questions such as 

  • Did the capacity match your needs? 
  • Were there any issues or oversights?

Additionally, they should be coming to an agreement with you about retaining collated performance data so that it can be used during the planning process of next year’s Black Friday marketing campaign.

This ensures continuous improvement and better preparedness for the next peak period.

By following these steps, you can ensure a seamless and successful Black Friday campaign. Early planning, a data-driven approach and real-time collaboration with your hosting provider are key to making sure your infrastructure can handle peak demand and deliver the best Black Friday campaign possible for your ecommerce brand! 

On behalf of everyone at Akoova, we wish you a successful and rewarding Black Friday season … and beyond! 

Contact us button

If you’re experiencing problems with your current hosting partner and would like an initial exploratory chat about your Magento cloud hosting requirements, contact us today and we can schedule a call on a date and time that suits you.

Akoova provides K-Hosting, a fully tailored and automated cloud platform, powered by AWS, for Magento hosting of supreme ecommerce brands such as Fred Perry, Big Bus Tours and Diptyque Paris, along with a leading European football club.

Share
  • twitter
  • twitter
  • twitter
AWS Black Friday Cloud Ecommerce Hosting Magento support

Sign up to our mailing list

Subscribe