Expect Online Downtime This Holiday Season as Buyers Overload Retail Websites Cautions SingleHop, Inc.

CHICAGO, Dec. 13 -- Chicago-based managed dedicated server provider, SingleHop, Inc., advises shoppers to be prepared to suffer through the dreaded "high traffic volume" warnings this holiday season as retailers may be hit with higher than average website traffic. Sears.com was an early indication; the giant retailer's website went down during Black Friday, according to the websitepulse.com monitoring service.

"It's pretty clear that online sales are critical for a retailer's success, and anything that slows or impedes the user experience can have an incredible and immediate bottom line cost," says Zak Boca, President, SingleHop. "Normally a website is slow because the server cannot handle the amount of connections that it is receiving. Too many visitors and you have a crash and can literally count the money you're not making by the second," he adds. "The answer to this is load balancing. Load-balancing is done by routing requests across multiple servers. One visitor comes in, and they go to webserver 1, and the next visitor will go to webserver 2. It basically just serves as a director for traffic, and as such it allows a website to easily scale."

U.S. online retailers took in more than $500 million the day after Thanksgiving, an increase of 20% over 2006. According to Nielsen Online, Best Buy and Circuit City had triple the volume of online traffic over last year. The trend has been on a steady increase for several quarters now.

"Ironically retailers have had all year to prepare for this (good) problem. By analyzing the previous year's traffic and having a service provider configure load balancing services, the cost of doubling your capacity can (in many instances) be mitigated and the issue of overloading a server is moot. The end result is capturing the business that a down server costs," adds Boca.

Not every provider has load-balancers on hand, because they are expensive, which means that it might take some time before your provider can have one in, and configured (not to mentioned trained!). According to Boca, "Retailers should take the necessary steps and either anticipate the increase in traffic by having a load balancer setup, and configured along with additional webservers, or at least make sure that your provider can have you set up in a matter of hours, not days."

While the precautions that providers can take are relatively inexpensive and easy to get going, there are a lot of websites that will not be prepared. For consumers that means either moving along to another website, or conducting online shopping in the off hours, essentially avoiding the 'checkout lines,' as referred to in traditional retail.

About SingleHop, Inc.

SingleHop, Inc., is a full service managed dedicated hosting provider that was founded on the principal of providing reliable, cost-effective dedicated services. The company was founded by Zak Boca, who along with Dan Ushman started midPhase Services, Inc., which today is a leading shared web managed hosting company that services over 75,000 websites. SingleHop and midPhase maintain entirely separate support teams and operations; however, customers will be able to take advantage of the combined buying power of midPhase, which results in an overall savings on top of the line hardware, and bandwidth.

The cornerstone of SingleHop managed hosting is the a la Carte Server Management Program, which is a full-array of transparent management services that were designed, and tested to allow business customers to tailor their level of support to their needs or expertise. The model was tested on midPhase's dedicated client base of over 500 servers, and it was decided to create SingleHop, a managed dedicated hosting company that would focus entirely on managed services via the a la Carte Server Management Program. http://www.singlehop.com/