When choosing a web hosting company for an ecommerce website, failing to take expected traffic spikes into account can be a costly mistake. (unexpected traffic spikes are a good wake up call to review your web hosting service and requirements)   Potentially, clients can become frustrated. Worse,they could take their business elsewhere. 

Valentine’s Day is a great day for any vendor selling flowers. And as demonstrated with most retail commerce, the buying trends of potential customers turning to the web marketplace continues to expand. This is big business. Americans alone are expected to spend in excess of $18 billion on Valentine’s Day gifts this year.

Uptime monitoring service Pingdom decided to see how some of the more popular flower websites would handle themselves on Valentine’s Day.

Slowdown and crashes

Several websites showed clear slowdown, especially in the morning hours of Valentine’s Day. A lot of last-minute orders by men no doubt. Here are some very telling charts for three of the websites monitored, Flower.com, Justflowers.com,  Sendflowers.com.

These three sites clearly illustrate the increased load these sites are subjected to, and that it can actually noticeably affect the performance of a website. ( With the images fully loaded, the overall load time was even slower.)

Out of the websites monitored for this survey, 1800flowers.com clearly stood out for two reasons. One was that it was generally much slower than the others, and second because it recorded a significant amount of downtime. More than eight hours in just the past few days, most of it on Friday afternoon, US time, when it was unavailable for four hours and then even more later in the evening.

Another site that also had downtime at a very bad time, almost and hour-and-a-half spread over the day on February 14, was 1stinflowers.com.

There were sites that worked just fine, with no noticeable issues. These included Proflowers.com, Shop.marthastewart.com, Hallmark.com and Findaflorist.com.

Downtime and slowdown can, and will happen to all websites. However a flower website having problems during business hours on Valentine’s Day is a prime example of bad timing. A slow website will turn away customers because it’s the equivalent of poor, slow service.  A crashed website is not only embarrassing, but is the same as completely closing shop with a big sign saying: “Go to some other shop and spend your money, we’re closed!”