Reliability concerns with online advertising
                     Reliability concerns with online advertising
John Z
Writes on ad servers, involved with Adspeed advertising 
platform & Adspeed Ad serving software.
Online advertising is a complex environment with many different 
moving parts provided by different vendors. Publishers need to host 
their website, which include web pages, images, videos and other 
components. The website also includes external media, third-party 
widgets and ad tags to display creatives from adservers. On the other 
side of the advertising supply chain, we have advertisers, who need to 
track their ads, host their landing pages and operate their e-commerce 
system. Any of these many components can have issues from time to 
time. Let us discuss some of the possible problems and what you can do 
to prevent and respond to these issues.
Outages do happen, albeit rarely
The fact of the matter is that there simply is no system that can be considered 100% 
perfect. That is also very much the case with online advertising. Just as you might 
lose your internet connection or cannot load a website from time to time, you may 
also find that outages with online ad serving do happen. A small networking issue can 
cause a slowdown because traffic is routed via an alternative carrier. A major power 
outage can take down a whole datacenter which contains many servers. For a small 
issue, some ads might be slower than usual to load but only some users. For a major 
issue, ads might not load at all and your site can be dragged down or become non-
responsive.
Outages happen because the whole ad ecosystem is very complex. It 
consists of multiple systems from different vendors around the world. 
The dependencies between these systems vary widely but in a bad case, 
an outage to one system can bring down another system. A system-wide 
outage that brings down all ads for everyone everywhere is very rare. 
More often, the incident is isolated to a component or a link within this 
ad delivery chain. Ads may be slow to load just to some viewers while 
loading quickly for everyone else.
Impact of outages
Although an outage is not a common occurrence, it is also one that you 
need to plan and prepare for. Your goal is to prevent a high-impact 
outage and limit its negative effects on your business operations. One 
option is not relying on any single vendor alone for all of your needs. 
Spread out your eggs into multiple baskets. The goal is to separate the 
whole customer experience into different areas. Some are critical and 
some are optional. For example, if your website contains a fully 
automated online ordering process then that area is critical and should 
have its own dedicated site, subdomain and servers away from the main 
website and away from ad-supported areas.
 Another example is to have two separate systems: your website can 
have a public facing area with advertisements and another area for 
registered users without ads. It is a good idea to take some time to 
evaluate what you can separate and what you can do to increase 
reliability. Multiple what-if scenarios will help you identify what should 
be moved to a different, maybe dedicated system.
Part 2 - Action plan, reliable partners and global reach (coming soon)
Part 3 - Image host, video server, and landing pages (coming soon)
About Adspeed
AdSpeed ad server is a reliable & powerful ad serving and ad 
management solution that serves your ads, tracks impressions & clicks 
and reports ad statistics in real-time. Driven by the latest ad serving 
technologies, the goal of Adspeed adserver is to provide a reliable 
platform that can help in executing online advertising strategy more 
efficiently. 
Thank you for spending your precious time in reading this article.