Valentine's Day Traffic Slams Florist Sites

Is your data center ready to handle traffic on your busiest day? That's the challenge facing retailers with seasonal business, where huge sales may be concentrated into a narrow time window. A good example is florists, who see heavy activity in the run-up to Valentine's Day.

"Every year, some of these websites won’t be prepared to handle the increase in visitor traffic and as a result they slow down significantly, or even crash under the pressure," writes Pingdom, which conducted an analysis of how the web sites for the leading  flower vendors fared during this year's holiday.

One major site - 1800flowers.com - experienced significant availability problems, with more than eight hours of downtime during the holiday period. That included a four-hour outage on the afternoon of Friday, Feb. 11, when many customers were likely arranging deliveries for Monday morning delivery on Feb. 14.

See Pingdom for the full report.