Internet - The World Wide Web
Optimizing Your Web Site's Performance

Optimizing Your Web Site's Performance

Your Web site consists of a combination of hardware and software that must be chosen to serve your unique needs and support your relationship marketing efforts. These tools must first of all be suitable to the task at hand in terms of volume of traffic they will support and your informational and transactional needs. These tools need to be flexible enough to accommodate the inevitable changes that will take place as your business grows. They need to be powerful enough to support surges of activity and traffic (like when you have a special offer or a live event), and they need to be powerful and expandable enough to support overnight growth without needing replacement.

Not only should each of these points be addressed, but the resulting information infrastructure should be integrated with your relationship marketing initiative. This does not happen by accident. It happens though careful planning, equipment selection, design, implementation, and operation.

Adequate Internet Connection
Traffic to your Web site comes to your Web server through your Internet connection. Your connection needs to be fast enough to support the highest anticipated traffic and reliable enough to make sure your site visitors can reach your site 24 hours a day, seven days a week. If your connection is down or simply too crowded, and visitors cannot reach your Web site they may never return.

If you will host your own Web server, you will need a high-speed Internet connection to the physical location of your server hardware. The typical minimum Internet connection for self-hosted Web sites is a T1 connection, which can support up to 1.544Mb/s (megabytes per second). This is sufficient for fairly large Web sites but can become a bottleneck at periods of peak usage such as live chats, product announcements, or special offers. Advanced media like streaming audio can place enormous demands on your Internet connection.

Internet service providers (ISPs) have their own high-speed Internet connections to their upstream provider. If an ISP is hosting your Web site, your site will share their upstream connection with all other Web sites they host. If one hosted site is experiencing a lot of traffic, your site can suffer. You should talk with your ISP about their upstream connection and get them to assure you they have sufficient upstream capacity today and in the future. Also ask them if they have “multiple, redundant connections” with multiple upstream connectivity providers. That way, if one of their upstream providers goes down, or if one of their physical connection lines goes down, people can still reach your Web site. The reliability that comes from multiple, redundant connections is one of the primary benefits of having an ISP host your site.

Capable Web Server Hardware and Software
If you will be hosting your own Web site, make sure you have the hardware to easily support your highest anticipated traffic and 6 to 12 months of anticipated growth. Web servers benefit from large amounts of RAM memory (512 Mb or more) and fault tolerant features like multiple power supplies, redundant disk drives, and networking cards. Your Web server should also have an uninterruptible power supply in case the power goes out for a short while. Basically, anything that can fail needs to have a backup, preferably “hot-swappable,” which means it can be replaced without turning the computer off or rebooting.

An increasingly common approach to increasing the availability of Web sites is through a hardware redundancy technique called “clustering.” A cluster is two or more identical computers configured to share the traffic the site receives. Each is equipped with a special “failover” capability so that if one machine fails for any reason, the Web site is instantly served from the remaining machine, or machines, in the cluster. When the failed machine is repaired, it rejoins the cluster. Also remember that the physical facility where your Web server is installed must be secure and have good environmental characteristics and adequate and reliable power. And your Web server should be backed up regularly with tapes or other backup medium kept at another physical location.

If your Web site will need to process a large number of transactions, the processor speed and the number of processors should be increased over the basics. In this case, the I/O throughput of the hard disks on your server should also be increased.

The operating system and Web server software will be determined by your overall information needs and should be chosen to be compatible with your database, Web site reporting, and e-mail integration needs. If an ISP will be hosting your Web site, your Web site will probably share a computer with several dozen other Web sites. Rarely will you have the opportunity to impact the configuration of their hardware.

Compatible Database Software and Application Server
Most likely, you will want to create a database-driven Web site, which means that most of your open and premium content is stored in a database. When a visitor comes to your Web site and views a page, the content is called up from the database and gets formatted and sent to the visitor as HTML. This significantly simplifies ongoing site maintenance and the integration of your Web site visitor tracking and e-mail databases.

The selection of a database and an application server (the software that integrates the Web site and your database) should be made to insure compatibility with your other information integration needs. Most popular software tools in this category today are quite interoperable, but you need to investigate carefully and specifically address the compatibility with your e-mail system and other pre-existing information infrastructure components.

Remember that depending on the anticipated volume of your Web site, you may need separate computer hardware on which to install your database. Typically, all but the smallest Web sites have one or more computers functioning as Web servers as well as one or more computers functioning as database and application servers. Larger Web sites can have dozens or hundreds of servers. Make sure that the tools you select can accommodate the growth, or “scalability,” you require. It would be a terrible thing if you had to abandon your system in a few months and start over. With careful planning, growth can be seamless. As your needs magnify, you can add additional computers, more storage, additional high-speed Internet connections, and the software that makes it all work.

If your site will be hosted by an ISP, you will have little choice over the database and application server programs they use. You should select your ISP based on the compatibility of their database with your overall information needs. You should also discuss your anticipated growth and let them describe to you their plan for keeping up with your needs.

* Source - Streetwise Relationship Marketing On The Internet
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