Opinion: Bet365 stumbles at the last hurdle
Site outages around major sporting events like Grand National downtime shouldn't happen and can easily be avoided with effective planning, argues Compuware's EMEA sales director and CTO Michael Allen
The Grand National is a red letter day for British bookmakers. It was estimated a quarter of the population would bet on this year’s race; with 600 million viewers in over 140 countries, and betting exceeding £150m. In short, it’s kind of a big deal. The race also attracts a whole new audience. It seems like everyone has a flutter on the national – it’s a British institution.
As many of these gamblers are not the faces you would normally see in your local betting shop, this puts added pressure on gaming companies to create robust services that can handle the added demand. I remember my frustration last year when the Paddy Power website crashed, which got our team thinking that it might happen again.
With this in mind, we at Compuware decided to conduct some benchmark tests, using our Gomez performance monitoring platform, to see how the leading gaming websites coped as the pressure mounted and the bets started flooding in. Looking at the results, Paddy Power had obviously learnt from last year’s mistakes, with the site proving remarkably resilient against the onslaught. Bet365 on the other hand, stumbled at the last hurdle.
The bet365 website suffered from a serious 503 error, which essentially means that the server didn’t have enough resources to cope with the amount of requests being received. As a result, the majority of users were unable to access the website or place bets for at least 10 minutes during prime betting time (4.00pm “ 4.10pm), right before the race started at 4.15pm.I’d hate to think how much revenue bet365 lost out on during that critical ten minute period.
As we all know, the cut-throat world of gaming means if a user tries a website and it fails to launch they will move on straight away. There are no second chances and a whole raft of competitors are ready and waiting to jump in your grave. Will they be steering others away claiming your site claiming it ‘always crashes’? Despite the fact they have only used it once, the memory sticks and word spreads.
To put it bluntly, in this day and age, there’s no reason why increased traffic should cause a website to crash. The Grand National is an annual event, yet companies still fail to recognise the importance of performance testing and the impact it can have on revenues. Gaming companies in particular are built around supporting big events, scaling up and down and handling huge levels of demand in short-time periods.
They should not be caught short in this way. There are numerous tests that can be done to ensure a website can handle the pressure. Testing in advance will flag up any problems so steps can be taken to ensure things run smoothly when the traffic hits. Given the peak and trough nature of the gaming business, I’m surprised this message hasn’t gotten through yet and that these failures are still happening.