By George, he’s crashed the website

It is, of course, a blatant piece of coat-tail riding, but who can blame any company for jumping on the aftermath of a once in a generation event if it can be exploited to make a point.

The event in question is the recent birth of Prince George to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. As the couple brought out the third in line to the crown from hospital, women the world over saw the dress that the duchess was wearing, learned the name of the designer, and promptly jumped online to access the designer’s website.

Now, being a grumpy old man, this is an action that your esteemed editor admits to finding hard to explain. However he is prepared to accept that it is a process which has happened often enough to be now classed as `eminently predictable’.

The next stage was equally predictable, for the website crashed because of insufficient resources.

As a result, Richard Davies, CEO of CSP, Elastichosts, penned the following observation.

“The news that the website for the designer of the dress Kate Middleton was wearing yesterday when she first showed the world the new future King of England crashed soon after shows the importance for e-Commerce businesses of planning for unexpected surges in demand. The designer may not have been aware that Kate was planning on wearing that dress, and that thousands of copycats would flock to their site to get the same look; but this is why having a flexible infrastructure, with the ability to scale up capacity at a moment’s notice is so important. e-Commerce relies on converting as many customer enquiries into sales as possible, and keeping up with trends as they happen; having a website that can support this agility is therefore crucial. Retailers should avoid this by ensuring their website is supported by a scalable, flexible and pay as you go infrastructure so that they can deal with whatever opportunities are around the corner.”

It would be churlish in the extreme to observe that the rule of Mandy Rice-Davies does apply here: `he would say that, wouldn’t he’. Though to be fair, it would have been a surprise if he had not. 

Setting that aside however, there is an object lesson to be learned here. If a business has any degree of unpredictability in its level of business, day-to-day or even minute-to-minute, a lot of business opportunities will be lost by not having the resources available to accommodate the changes. And unless there is an extremely good reason to invest in having enough bandwidth headroom, just in case, the only sensible answer now is to move to the cloud.