Web hosting provider warns that high bandwidth videos may bring down websites during peak season shopping demands.

London, 9th December, 2008 - Hostway is today warning online retailers that they could lose millions of pounds if they don’t plan carefully for the influx of visitors at Christmas. With many websites offering video trailers and video reviews, online shopping sites may find themselves reaching a performance bottleneck extremely quickly, resulting in slow website performance, potentially forcing consumers elsewhere for their Christmas bargains.

“Video content is the new ticking time bomb for online retailers,” commented Thomas Herbert, product manager, Hostway. “Although most ecommerce operations have now dealt successfully with website performance issues, video content brings a gamut of new problems this Christmas.
If a large number of people access video reviews or trailers at the same time, this can really slow down websites, and as we all know, poor performance can often be a deal-breaker for Christmas shoppers.”

According to recent figures from Jupiter, consumers in the UK are predicted to spend an average of £710 online in 2008 and will make an average of 9.3 purchases online during the year. Although overall anticipated consumer spending in the UK will drop by around 7% this year (Source: The Deloitte Christmas Survey) 57% stated that they had no intention of changing their Christmas buying patterns. Furthermore, 15% of consumers expect to do their Christmas shopping online - an 8% increase over 2006 - so e-commerce operations still need to plan for high shopper volumes.

“Videos add depth to product sites - it’s great to see clips from a DVD, footage from a game, or a video review of a product,” continued Herbert. “Unfortunately, if too many people access these sites at once, they can slow down and become unusable. People may find that their experience of sites featuring this content, such as Play.com, Amazon and HMV suffers, and switch to more stripped-down sites like Zavvi or Dabs, which only have images and text. Furthermore, with visitors doing their shopping globally to take advantage of good exchange rates or products which aren’t available locally, companies need to make sure that their websites are responsive even when visitors from abroad are watching long video reviews. However, with proper planning and the right tools, online stores don’t need to experience these problems, and can make sure that they maximise their revenues during the festive season.”

Hostway Worldwide
Hostway Corporation provides domain name registration, Web hosting and ecommerce, colocation, managed dedicated hosting, SaaS hosting, Web design and online marketing services to nearly 2 million customers and over 2 million Web sites worldwide. It operates over 250,000 square feet of state-of-the-art data centers to reduce the complexity and cost of Web-based technologies for small businesses and large enterprises. Founded in 1998, Hostway is one of the world’s largest Web hosting companies with a direct presence in 13 countries, 17 worldwide operation centers and more than 700 employees.