Black Friday is November 27 and Cyber Monday November 30. Most peak-day outages are not raw capacity: they are a quota nobody raised, a database connection limit, a third-party API that throttles, or a cache that was never warm. A four-week plan, the AWS limits worth checking, and what to freeze.
Peak traffic finds the weakest link, and it is rarely the one the team scaled. Four weeks is enough to find it first if you test the whole path, including the parts you do not run.
Book a free 30-minute call. You'll leave knowing what we'd do first and roughly what it costs, whether or not you hire us.
Week 1: set the target (last year's peak times your growth, times a safety factor), map the full checkout path including third parties, and file quota increases.
Week 2: load test production-like environments with realistic flows (browse, search, cart, checkout), using AWS's Distributed Load Testing solution or your own tool. Find the first thing that breaks.
Week 3: fix it, retest, find the next one. Warm caches and CDNs for top products. Rehearse the incident process.
Week 4: change freeze on checkout, payments and infrastructure, dashboards and alerts on the business metric (orders per minute), and people on call with clear owners.
Decide in advance what to turn off under load: recommendations, reviews, personalization.
Put a queue in front of anything slow that does not need to happen during the request, such as confirmation email and ERP updates.
Have a waiting room ready for flash sales, so overload produces a queue rather than errors.
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Book a free 30-minute call about it. Bring your setup and your bill; you'll leave knowing what we'd do first and roughly what it costs, whether or not you hire us.
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As of October 26, 2026. Provided as is, for general information, and accurate to the best of our knowledge on the date shown. Not legal, compliance, tax, financial or other professional advice. Prices, limits and vendor services change; check current vendor documentation before relying on anything here. Terms of use.