From a user perspective, when we are surfing we have two very important expectations. The first is that our high-speed connection gets us where we want to go. The second is that once we get to our destination, putting content including site design aside, the site’s performance enables us to obtain the information we seek and not become an obstacle. Unfortunately, as is way too often the case, the website we are visiting are literally and figuratively the root cause of major frustration.

This frustration we experience, especially now that our interactions with websites and their applications increasing involve rich content such as interesting applications and video, should not and not be the case. Technologies do exist, and need to be part of any organization’s holistic approach to improving the customer experience to ensure “being there” is a pleasurable experience.

Realities are that your website in not merely an address. It is somebody’s destination and one that they are visiting with intent. It has become the way in which most people experience your brand. If that destination becomes a hassle only bad things will result, i.e., lost revenue opportunities, reputation damage and upset customers who have lots of choices. Indeed, the old sayings that “You never get a second chance to make a first impression,” and “You need to earn the customer’s trust every day” (and in an omnichannel world is every way), have never been truer.

So what are the solutions available to mitigate the problems of bad performing websites, especially as we move into a cloud-centric world?  At a high level it can be summed up in two words “load balancing.” The trick is to up website availability and performance by using next generation technologies to gain visibility into network performance and assure that resources are optimized so traffic flows can smooth out the rough edges giving operators control and peace of mind and end users the kind of experiences that please rather than annoy. 

This is not easy to do yourself, but as traffic explodes and more and more mission critical applications and other capabilities move to the cloud assuring optimal performance has become a necessity. After all, slow responses have big consequence and even a brief outage can cost organizations thousands of customers. It mandates that cloud deployments are flexible and bulletproof.

That is where and why cloud load balancing has become an important. When properly implemented it manages online traffic by distributing workloads across multiple servers and resources and optimizes the performance of those resources. 

If you would like to start 2015 off by getting answers to your questions about getting your cloud resources in balance, you are invited to join myself, Scott Hilton (News - Alert), Executive Vice President of Products at Dyn and Rohit Mehra, Vice President of Network Infrastructure at IDC (News - Alert), Thursday January 22 at 2:00PM EST to participate live in the webinar: Maximize Website Availability & Performance through Cloud Load Balancing.

What we will be discussing in detail are:

• Why rapid growth websites and businesses running mission-critical applications in the Cloud need to consider Cloud Load Balancing
• Fundamental load balancing strategies
• Turning 99.9 percent uptime into 99.999 percent uptime using cloud-based load balancing
• How to circumvent CDN outages and optimize performance

This is an opportunity to find out about the benefits of Cloud Load Balancing and CDN Load Balancing as the means to maximize website availability and performance, and to learn about how Dyn (News - Alert) Traffic Management can create a resilient, high availability solution spread across multiple cloud providers. And, most importantly, it is a chance to ask the experts about how to improve the importance of your cloud and CDN resources so customers are delighted when they come to visit.