Today comes every day. But promotion on the TODAY Show comes along rarely, if at all. The TODAY Show is the top morning TV show in America, with more than 5 million viewers each day.
So, when the management team at Khataland.com got the call that Jill Martin was going to feature one of their products in the Steals & Deals promotion on Tuesday, January 24, they were excited. And then they got to work.[
NBC editors tell featured companies to expect up to 100,000 hits in the span of a few minutes after the TV segment airs, with follow-on spikes as the show airs in each successive time zone. So the team at Khataland got in touch with CoreCommerce, who runs their online store, and made some plans to handle the expected surge.
Those plans quickly involved CloudFlare.
Working Together
CloudFlare works in cooperation with any webserver or platform to make sure websites are safe, fast, and available. There's no relationship required between CloudFlare and your host, but it doesn't hurt that CloudFlare and CoreCommerce serve several customers together. For instance, earlier this month, Benderbound enjoyed the combination to make sure their site was fast and available during a smaller TODAY Show appearance.
So, when Khataland asked CoreCommerce for help, they recommended CloudFlare.
Here's how Brandon Wanamaker, from the quality assurance team, put it:
We always do our best to provide top-tier service to our customers at the product and customer experience levels. CloudFlare allows us to multiply our efforts to speed up the software; reduces the merchant's expense by absorbing a very large majority of bandwidth usage; and protects higher profile, or otherwise unfortunate, targets of a denial of service attack and other malicious traffic. The more merchants on our system using CloudFlare, the faster and safer the CoreCommerce system is. Shoppers are less likely to abandon their shopping carts on a faster site. Merchants avoid huge bandwidth usage and possibly overages. Finally, it makes our lives a little easier when the system is running smoothly. It's changed how we handle stores featured on a national TV broadcast, with potential surge in traffic. We insist on CloudFlare to keep their stores and CoreCommerce running quickly, with no hiccups. With such huge exposure, downtime is not an option, and in every case, CloudFlare has never failed. And the setup is way too simple for something that does so much. Registration, a few clicks and you're done! I can't say enough good things about the experience the CoreCommerce team and our merchants have had working with CloudFlare.
Quick Setup, Fantastic Results
The team at Khataland signed up for CloudFlare directly, changed their nameservers, and ordered CloudFlare Pro to secure transactions with Full SSL. Everything was in place in under an hour, letting the Khataland and CoreCommerce team focus on other preparations for making a whole bunch of brand-new customers happy.
Here's what Khataland shared:
We had huge interest from Today Show viewers. In the first hour after the show, we had more than 60,000 views and sold more than half of our special packages for the show. Our website remained up and functioning during this huge spike.
See the spike for yourself, starting in the largest viewership (Eastern Time) with each time zone providing another bump an hour later.
Brandon on the CoreCommerce team tweeted about the resources saved.
Here's a more graphical view from the CloudFlare dashboard, showing thesavings.
Make The Most Of Your Time In The Spotlight
Surges in traffic come for many reasons beyond TV promotion, from the Halloween holiday, a pre-Christmas sale, or simply Groundhog Day (next week!). CloudFlare's ability to deliver information quickly to your visitors without overloading your webserver becomes dramatically important during these surges.
But a fast, always available, secure website is important every day, so sign up for CloudFlare now.