Getting Ready for ‘Shark Tank’ to Air
As Aaron prepares for the airing of the seasonal finale of “Shark Tank”—where he’s pitching his hair care line Pete & Pedro—he wants to discuss the importance of building a website that can handle heavy spikes in traffic. Appearing on the show could give your company as much as $8 million worth of free advertising, so you need to be prepared for anything.
Making Sure Your Site Can Handle Spikes
In anticipation of the episode airing, Aaron has been working with his developer and hosting provider to figure out how to handle an increase in traffic during and after the premiere. He knows that viewers will likely migrate to his site en masse, but he doesn’t know specifically how they’ll get there.
When you’re prepping for a big spike, be sure to ask yourself questions like: Where are people going initially? Are they searching through Google or typing in your URL? How many people can you reasonably expect? This will help you develop your plan.
Aaron knows that each episode of “Shark Tank” gets around 8 or 9 million views, so he has to make some changes. After calling his hosting company and learning that he needs an upgraded plan for $3,000, Aaron turns to his developer.
His developer says that, by setting up a tool called Cloudflare—which replicates your website so that the traffic load is more spread out and your site is faster—his site could be fine when hit with heavy traffic, but it’s not a guarantee.
Triple-Checking Your Site’s Performance
Even though it would save him a ton of money, Aaron isn’t comfortable with this new plan. To ensure that his strategy works, he does some load testing to measure the site’s responsiveness and to make sure that it stays up. When hit with just 2,000 viewers, the Pete & Pedro site crashes. As a result, Aaron goes back to the hosting company to negotiate the cost of a higher-traffic plan for the month.
Finally, Aaron gives a quick update on Tiege Hanley and announces when the launch date will be revealed. Stay tuned to Aaron’s vlog for more!
