SingleHop, a full service managed hosting provider, says that recent online failures by big corporate shopping sites represents online usage exceeding capacity this Holiday season

November 30, 2006 – (TopHosts News Brief) – Managed hosting provider SingleHop, Inc. warns that Thursday November 23’s failure of Amazon.com and the Friday November 24’s failure of walmart.com reflects problems at the gate this holiday season for online shoppers.

SingleHops says that when online usage exceeds capability the results are outages, which a company may try to thinly veil as “scheduled maintenance.”

“Planning scheduled maintenance that precludes consumers from buying on one of the busiest shopping days of the year really doesn’t add up,” Zak Boca, president of SingleHop, said in a company press release. “We expect that with the predicted record influx in traffic, a large number of online retailers will be unprepared, which will result in downtime that can cost businesses thousands of dollars in lost revenue, and as seen in some high-profile cases, as much as $1M per minute.”

Online holiday spending is expected to reach more than $32 billion dollars this year, with consumers spending 53% of their holiday budgets online. According to a recent Harris Interactive survey, 40% of online consumers will leave a website if it’s experiencing issues, and retailers have a scant eight seconds to engage and capture a consumer’s attention before they move on.

SingleHop says e-commerce applications have to have the additional capacity to handle the holiday rush, meaning your website, your shopping carts, and your ordering systems should be capable of supporting an additional 40% of utilization.

For more information visit http://www.singlehop.com.